Audiobooks by Michael Ondaatje

The Distance of a Shout: Selected Poems Audiobook

"Brought to you by Penguin. From independence movements in Sri Lanka to train stations in contemporary Ontario, an intimate and witty selection of Michael Ondaatje’s most widely loved poems taken across fifty years The poetry of Michael Ondaatje begins in memory: distant landscapes, myths from childhood, fleeting interactions with loved ones, and characters from history itself. In poems that are spare as often as they are fable-like - as tender as they are heart-wrenching - the poet navigates the past, looks toward the future, and unearths inevitable truths about the world. Assembling Michael Ondaatje’s finest poems in one brilliant volume, The Distance of a Shout chronicles the poet’s journey - moving book to book, moment to moment, border to border - and leads the reader through the threshold of discovery itself. The Distance of a Shout is a profound and gorgeous collection by an indispensable poet of our time, and proof of why miraculous poetry endures. 'My life always stops for a new book by Michael Ondaatje' JHUMPA LAHIRI 'Each new book of Michael Ondaatje’s is a literary event, but that is particularly true for his books of poetry' TERRANCE HAYES © Michael Ondaatje 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026"

Michael Ondaatje (Author), TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Collected Works of Billy the Kid

"Brought to you by Penguin. Booker prize winning author Michael Ondaatje invites you on a brutal, beautiful journey into the American West. . . At twenty-one years old, Billy the Kid has killed a man for each year he’s been alive. Roaming the blasted planes of the Wild West, he moves between friends, foes and lovers, fighting to keep just one step ahead of the law. Yet in this twisted wasteland – a country of mad dogs, of sweat and gore and blinding heat – the sheriffs play dirty too. Melding prose, poetry, imagined interviews and ephemeral photography, Ondaatje weaves together a lyrical reinterpretation of Billy’s short, infamous existence, forming a portrait of a young man, and a young country, borne out of violence, threaded through with disaster, yet rich in wonder. ‘Ondaatje’s language is clean and energetic, with the pop of bullets. This is literature, art.’ Annie Dillard 'Ondaatje’s eye for detail is wonderful and he uses it poetically, with superb restraint' Larry McMurtry © Michael Ondaatje 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025"

Michael Ondaatje (Author), Nathan Osgood (Narrator)

Audiobook

Coming Through Slaughter

"Brought to you by Penguin. Discover Michael Ondaatje's debut novel, 'a beautifully detailed story, perhaps the finest jazz novel ever written' Sunday Times Based on the life of cornet player Buddy Bolden, one of the legendary jazz pioneers of turn-of-the-twentieth-century New Orleans, Coming Through Slaughter is an extraordinary recreation of a remarkable musical life and a tragic conclusion. Through a collage of memoirs, interviews, imaginary conversations and monologues, Ondaatje builds a picture of a man who would work by day at a barber shop and by night unleash his talent to wild audiences who had never experienced such playing. But Buddy was also playing the field with two women, and inside his head was a ticking time-bomb which he was unable to stop. © Michael Ondaatje 1979 (P) Penguin Audio 2024"

Michael Ondaatje (Author), Dion Graham (Narrator)

Audiobook

A Year of Last Things: from the Booker Prize-winning author of The English Patient

"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 – describing himself as a “mongrel,” 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 Moliere’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 – 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: “Reading 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 cities”. Poetry – 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 ©2024 Michael Ondaatje (P)2024 Penguin Audio"

Michael Ondaatje (Author), Michael Ondaatje (Narrator)

Audiobook

Anil's Ghost

"Brought to you by Penguin. A breath-taking novel about love and the horrors of civil war from the bestselling author of The English Patient. Anil's Ghost transports us to Sri Lanka, a country steeped in centuries of tradition, now forced into the late twentieth century by the ravages of a bloody civil war. Enter Anil Tissera, a young woman and forensic anthropologist born in Sri Lanka but educated in the West, sent by an international human rights group to identify the victims of the murder campaigns sweeping the island. When Anil discovers that the bones found in an ancient burial site are in fact those of a much more recent victim, her search for the terrible truth hidden in her homeland begins. What follows is a story about love, about family, about identity - a story driven by a riveting mystery. 'There is much to astonish, to disturb and to admire in this book... A rare triumph' Guardian ©2011 Michael Ondaatje (P)2023 Penguin Audio"

Michael Ondaatje (Author), Nimmi Harasgama (Narrator)

Audiobook

[Spanish] - El paciente inglés

"Con inusitada belleza e inteligencia, Michael Ondaatje traza la intersección en los últimos días de la Segunda Guerra Mundial y en una villa italiana abandonada, de cuatro vidas dañadas. Ganadora del Golden Man Booker Prize 2018, el único de la historia. Hana, una enfermera agotada por la muerte que la rodea, se dedica obsesivamente a su último paciente. Caravaggio, el ladrón, intenta volver a imaginar quién es ahora que sus manos están irremediablemente mermadas. Kip, el rastreador de minas indio, busca artefactos ocultos en un paisaje donde nadie está a salvo excepto él. En el centro de este laberinto descansa el paciente inglés, completamente abrasado, un hombre sin nombre que es un acertijo y una provocación para sus compañeros, y cuyos recuerdos de traición, dolor y salvación iluminan la novela como destellos de luz ardiente. ** Con motivo del 50 aniversario del Man Booker Prize, el más prestigioso premio de literatura del mundo anglófono, se concedió por única vez el Golden Man Booker Prize. El jurado del Premio Man Booker y el público eligieron la mejor de las 51 obras premiadas en el pasado... y optaron por esta novela de Michael Ondaatje, El paciente inglés. Reseñas: «El paciente inglés logra la triple corona: es profunda, bella y apasionante.» Toni Morrison «Más que una novela, es una alfombra mágica que nos traslada a través de épocas y geografías... Una red de sueños extraordinarios y cautivadora.» Time"

Michael Ondaatje (Author), José Luis Mediavilla (Narrator)

Audiobook

[German] - Divisadero (Ungekürzt)

"Die junge Liebe zwischen Anna und Coop nimmt ein gewaltsames Ende, als Annas Vater sie entdeckt. Auf verschlungenen Wegen gehen die Getrennten fortan durchs Leben: Coop betäubt seinen Lebensschmerz in den Spielhöllen von Las Vegas beim Poker. Seine an Übersinnlichkeit grenzende Begabung macht ihn zu einem der gefürchtetsten Spieler der Szene. Anna flüchtet nach Südfrankreich, wo sie sich völlig der Arbeit an einer Künstlerbiographie hingibt. Michael Ondaatje führt uns mitten hinein in einen Strudel aus Leidenschaft, Verlust und Vergangenheitsbewältigung. "

Michael Ondaatje (Author), Imogen Kogge (Narrator)

Audiobook

[German] - Kriegslicht

"1945, kurze nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg, lassen die Eltern des 14-jährigen Nathaniel ihn zusammen mit seiner Schwester Rachel allein in London zurück. Die Kinder bleiben in der Obhut des mysteriösen Mannes. Sie vermuten, dass er ein im Schmuggler sein könnte, doch sie geben ihre Vorbehalte auf, als sie seine exzentrischen Freunde kennenlernen. Es sind Männer und Frauen, die im Krieg an verschiedenen Missionen teilgenommen hatten. Sie werden zur Ersatzfamilie für Nathanael und Rachel. Ihre Erziehung ist dabei fürsorglich wie unkonventionell. Doch sind diese Menschen in Wahrheit auch jene, für sie sich geben? Ebenso eigenartig ist die Rückkehr der Mutter der beiden, ohne den Vater, ohne irgendeine Erklärung zu geben und ohne sich zu entschuldigen. Zwölf Jahre später beginnt Nathaniel all das aufzudecken, was er in jener Zeit nicht wissen und nicht verstehen konnte – und dieses Unternehmen erzählt Ondaatje anhand von Fakten, Erinnerungen und Phantasie in einem seiner schönsten Romane."

Michael Ondaatje (Author), Frank Stieren (Narrator)

Audiobook

Warlight

"Random House presents the audiobook edition of Warlight by Michael Ondaatje, read by George Blagden. 'Our book of the year – and maybe of Ondaatje's career' Daily Telegraph Books of the Year LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2018 An elegiac, dreamlike novel set in post-WW2 London about memory, family secrets and lies, from the internationally acclaimed author of The English Patient ‘The past never remains in the past…’ London, 1945. The capital is still reeling from the war. 14-year-old Nathaniel and his older sister Rachel are abandoned by their parents who leave the country on business, and are left in the dubious care of a mysterious figure named The Moth. Nathaniel is introduced to The Moth’s band of criminal misfits and is caught up in a series of teenage misadventures, from smuggling greyhounds for illegal dog racing to lovers’ trysts in abandoned buildings at night. But is this eccentric crew really what and who they claim to be? And most importantly, what happened to Nathaniel’s mother? Was her purported reason for leaving true? What secrets did she hide in her past? Years later Nathaniel, now an adult, begins to slowly piece together using the files of intelligence agencies – and through reality, recollection and imagination – the startling truths of puzzles formed decades earlier. ‘A novel of shadowy brilliance’ The Times ‘Fiction as rich, as beautiful, as melancholy as life itself, written in the visionary language of memory’ Observer ‘Ondaatje brilliantly threads the mysteries and disguises and tangled loyalties and personal yearnings of the secret world...and has constructed something of real emotional and psychological heft, delicate melancholy and yet, frequently, page-turning plottiness. I haven’t read a better novel this year.’ Telegraph"

Michael Ondaatje (Author), George Blagden (Narrator)

Audiobook

[German] - Katzentisch

"Auf einem gewaltigen Dampfer reisen drei Jungen zu Beginn der 50er Jahre von Sri Lanka nach England. Für den elfjährigen Michael und seine Freunde wird die Überfahrt zu einem unvergeßlichen Erlebnis. Immer auf der Suche nach Abenteuern treiben sich die drei herum, beobachten und spioniere - und werden Zeugen dramatischer Ereignisse. Im Rückblick erkennt Michael die lebensprägende Bedeutung der lang zurückliegenden Seereise und erinnert sich …"

Michael Ondaatje (Author), Johannes Steck (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Cat's Table

"In the early 1950s, an eleven-year-old boy in Colombo boards a ship bound for England. At mealtimes he is seated at the "cat's table"-as far from the Captain's Table as can be-with a ragtag group of "insignificant" adults and two other boys, Cassius and Ramadhin. As the ship makes its way across the Indian Ocean, through the Suez Canal, into the Mediterranean, the boys tumble from one adventure to another, bursting all over the place like freed mercury. But there are other diversions as well: one man talks with them about jazz and women, another opens the door to the world of literature. The narrator's elusive, beautiful cousin Emily becomes his confidante, allowing him to see himself "with a distant eye" for the first time, and to feel the first stirring of desire. Another Cat's Table denizen, the shadowy Miss Lasqueti, is perhaps more than what she seems. And very late every night, the boys spy on a shackled prisoner, his crime and his fate a galvanizing mystery that will haunt them forever. As the narrative moves between the decks and holds of the ship and the boy's adult years, it tells a spellbinding story-by turns poignant and electrifying-about the magical, often forbidden, discoveries of childhood and a lifelong journey that begins unexpectedly with a spectacular sea voyage."

Michael Ondaatje (Author), Michael Ondaatje (Narrator)

Audiobook

Audiobooks by Michael Ondaatje

Join Our Community