Give audiobooks, support local bookstores! Start gifting
A Year of Last Things by Michael Ondaatje
  Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

      Log in       Create account
Illustration of person sitting

Shop small, give big!

With credit bundles, you choose the number of credits and your recipient picks their audiobooks—all in support of local bookstores.

Start gifting
Phone showing make the switch message

Limited-time offer

Get two free audiobooks!

Nowโ€™s a great time to shop indie. When you start a new one credit per month membership supporting local bookstores with promo code SWITCH, weโ€™ll give you two bonus audiobook credits at sign-up.

Sign up today

A Year of Last Things

Due to publisher restrictions, this audiobook is unavailable for purchase in your selected country.
Narrator Michael Ondaatje

This audiobook uses AI narration.

Weโ€™re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.

Learn more
Length 2 hours 10 minutes
Language English
  Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

      Log in       Create account

Summary

Brought to you by Penguin.

With A Year of Last Things, acclaimed novelist Michael Ondaatje returns to poetry, where he began his career over fifty years ago, and what a return it is.


Born in Sri Lanka during the Second World War, Ondaatje was sent as a child to school in London, and later moved to Canada. While he has lived here since, these poems reflect the life of a writer, traveller and watcher of the world โ€“ describing himself as a โ€œmongrel,โ€ someone born out of diverse cultures.

Here, rediscovering the influence of every border crossed, he moves back and forth in time, from a childhood in Sri Lanka to Moliereโ€™s chair during his last stage performance, from icons in Bulgarian churches to the California coast and loved Canadian rivers, merging memory with the present, looking back on a life of displacement and discovery, love and loss. At first sight it is a glittering collection of fragments and memories โ€“ but small, intricate pieces of a life are precisely what matter most to Ondaatje. They make an emotional history. As he writes in the opening poem: โ€œReading the lines he loves / he slips them into a pocket, / wishes to die with his clothes / full of torn freestanzas / and the telephone numbers / of his children in far citiesโ€. Poetry โ€“ where language is made to work hardest and burns with a gem-like flame - is what Ondaatje has returned to in this intimate history.

'My life always stops for a new book by Michael Ondaatje'
JHUMPA LAHIRI, author of The Namesake

ยฉ2024 Michael Ondaatje (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Illustration of person sitting

Shop small, give big!

With credit bundles, you choose the number of credits and your recipient picks their audiobooks—all in support of local bookstores.

Start gifting
Phone showing make the switch message

Limited-time offer

Get two free audiobooks!

Nowโ€™s a great time to shop indie. When you start a new one credit per month membership supporting local bookstores with promo code SWITCH, weโ€™ll give you two bonus audiobook credits at sign-up.

Sign up today

Reviews

Extraordinarily attuned to hauntingsโ€ฆ Ondaatje is a connoisseur โ€“ and creator โ€“ of atmospheresโ€ฆ Wonderful Each new book of Michael Ondaatjeโ€™s is a literary event, but that is particularly true for his books of poetry. In A Year of Last Things he comes close to writing something like a timeless poem, โ€œa memory poemโ€ that reflects outside and inside time at the same moment, recording the mercurial, mysterious feeling of being alive. The poems become intimate, unresolved stories, loyal to feeling and presence, the lyricism of dreams applied to narratives of lives and landscapes. A Year of Last Things is a remarkable, incomparable new collection Michael Ondaatjeโ€™s love of the world and its wonders, the kindness he offers, the elegant lyricism of his sentences, the joy of storytelling... restore belief in the beauty and power of literature and, by extension, of humanity Michael Ondaatje defies the normal distinction between poet and novelist. His writing is consistently tuned to a visionary pitch After a break of nearly 20 years, Ondaatje has returned to poetry, ruminating on sliding doors moments in lifeโ€ฆ This is a generous, moving book Expand reviews
Give audiobooks, support local bookstores! Start gifting