Michael Ondaatje at Brookline Booksmith

Michael Ondaatje will be reading from Divisadero at Brookline Booksmith Monday, June 4, at 7:00 pm.

In Michael Ondaatje's latest work, a young woman in Petaluma, California, is caught with the family farmhand, tearing a family apart and setting off a chain of events that run through Nevada and all the way to France.

At first, the novel is all about this family - sisters Anna and Claire and the farmhand, Coop. They are scattered across the world to try to heal themselves. Then, much later, Anna travels to France to research the work of a writer, Lucien Segura, whose life parallels Anna's own.

Nearly every review we've come across describes the book as fragmentary, trying to evoke a mood of loss, which seems to be more of the point rather than tying up loose ends. Get a sense of the book before the reading with this excerpt.

Image of Divisadero from Amazon.