Anil’s Ghost

Author/Guide: Michael Ondaatje

Why a Booktrail?

2000s: The man who brought us The English Patient, now takes us on a journey to Sri Lanka

ISBN: 978-0099554455
Genre: Fiction

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What you need to know before your trail

Anil Tissera is a young woman born in Sri Lanka, educated in England and America. She returns to her homeland as a forensic anthropologist working for an international human rights group. They are keen to find out just who or what is at the centre of the island’s organized campaigns of murder.

This is a country steeped in history and civil war with many dark secrets and a hidden past.

When she finds that bones found in an ancient burial site are in fact those of a much more recent victim, her search for the terrible truth hidden right on her doorstep starts..

The search for the truth however will be fraught with danger and it is up to Anil to find her strength to be able to complete her work and come out alive.

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Sri Lanka of the early 1900s and a time when conflict and civil war ravaged the island

There is a sense of isolation and trouble imprinted on every page – people feel isolated and trapped in the conflict between the various parties in involved in the war notably the government, insurgents and the guerillas fighting for separatism. The war creates fear and death and it snakes around the island indiscriminately taking its next victim who is then found dumped in the river or some other random site. The only hope of protection from this it would seem was either silence and keeping your head down…or death.

So when Anil comes back to her homeland and is set to investigate the human rights abuses and the reasons for the murders, then she is far from welcome. Finding which party in the civil war is responsible seems an impossible task and she comes up against more than one obstacle and wall of silence along the way.

The reality here is one of the sheer chaos and destruction of civil war and the work of the medical staff as they attempt to patch up or otherwise the victims maimed in the country’s fighting. Bomb victims, those killed by minefields, or those stabbed and dumped – they’re all humans and each one a valuable life. Not here it would seem.

The fact that the three main characters are a forensic pathologist, a doctor and an archeologist is significant . Life and death and everything in between –

“Patterns of death always surrounded him. In his work he felt he was somehow the link between the mortality of flesh and bone and the immortality of an image on rock…”