Reading Order
In the Skin of a LionOndaatje's In the Skin of a Lion Reading Order
Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion (1987) is the Canadian novel most commonly described as the Canadian equivalent of the great Latin American magical realists — a richly sensory, non-linear portrait of the building of early twentieth-century Toronto through the stories of the immigrant and working-class men and women who constructed it but left no official record. Patrick Lewis, a young man from rural Ontario, arrives in Toronto in the 1920s and finds work searching for a disappeared millionaire; he enters the world of the bridge-builders, tunnel-diggers, and dye-workers who built the city's infrastructure, falls in love with an actress named Clara, and eventually with a woman named Alice whose partner, Nicholas Temelcoff, built the Bloor Street Viaduct in a chapter of hallucinatory beauty. Ondaatje's prose is lyrical to the point of near-poetry — dense with metaphor, non-linear in time, attentive to the textures of physical labor and immigrant life — and the novel ends where The English Patient (1992) begins, with Hana and Caravaggio as young characters. The two novels together constitute one of the great narrative projects in Canadian literature.
Where to start
In the Skin of a Lion
Complete In the Skin of a Lion Book List
- 1Buy
In the Skin of a Lion
Michael Ondaatje·1987·Start here — early Toronto, the bridge-builders, Patrick Lewis, the lyrical prequel to The English Patient. - 2Buy
The English Patient
Michael Ondaatje·1992·The Booker Prize-winning companion novel — Hana and the burned patient in an Italian villa, the same lyrical style at its most celebrated. - 3Buy
Running in the Family
Michael Ondaatje·1982·Ondaatje's memoir of his Sri Lankan family — non-linear, lyrical, the prose style of his fiction in its most autobiographical form. - 4Buy
The Collected Works of Billy the Kid
Michael Ondaatje·1970·The early experimental Ondaatje — prose poems, photographs, documents, the outlaw Billy the Kid, the work that announced his voice. - 5Buy
Divisadero
Michael Ondaatje·2007·A later Ondaatje — three young people in California and France, the same lyrical non-linearity applied to contemporary materials.
In the Skin of a Lion — Frequently Asked Questions
Should I read In the Skin of a Lion before The English Patient?
Either order works: In the Skin of a Lion was written first and introduces Hana and Caravaggio, but The English Patient is more celebrated and many readers come to the earlier novel through it. Reading In the Skin of a Lion first gives you a richer sense of who Hana and Caravaggio are when they appear in the Italian villa; reading The English Patient first gives you the pleasure of recognizing them when they appear in 1920s Toronto.
What makes Ondaatje's prose distinctive?
Ondaatje came to fiction from poetry, and his prose retains a poet's attention to the individual sentence and image over narrative momentum. His novels are non-linear, built from intensely rendered scenes rather than continuous narrative; they move through time by association and image rather than plot. The risk is that readers expecting a conventional novel will find him frustratingly elliptical; the reward is that individual passages achieve an intensity rarely found in prose fiction.
Is In the Skin of a Lion based on real history?
Yes, substantially. The building of Toronto's water filtration plants, the Bloor Street Viaduct, and the workers who built them are historical. Ondaatje researched extensively in the Toronto archives and was struck by how thoroughly the immigrant laborers who built the city's infrastructure had been erased from its official history. The novel is his act of fictional recovery — an attempt to give narrative form to the lives that the historical record doesn't preserve.
Monthly Newsletter
Never miss a big release
Get the most anticipated upcoming books delivered to your inbox once a month — no spam, no filler.
Monthly only. Unsubscribe anytime.
Book links are Amazon affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, BookReleaseRadar earns from qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you.