Warlight

It feels shallow to describe Ondaatje's prose as beautiful — surely I should be able to find a more piquant adjective — but it really is. His words shimmer. They give his characters' grief and trauma space to breathe, and his scenes are so tactile that, weeks later, I occasionally find myself thinking of blue cardigans, walled gardens, and the rain pouring through the roof of a postwar London house.