The Story Archive

Anil's Ghost

Michael Ondaatje · 2000 CE · Novel · Modern / American · Contemporary

A forensic anthropologist born in Sri Lanka returns from the West in the 1990s as part of a human-rights mission and, with a local archaeologist, tries to identify a skeleton found in a sealed government burial site. Civil war between state, insurgents and separatists closes around their work. Ondaatje's fourth novel, it turns his Sri Lankan origins to a fractured inquiry into disappearance.

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