In the Skin of a Lion: A Novel

With this dazzling predecessor to his Booker Prize-winning THE ENGLISH PATIENT, Michael Ondaatje gives us a novel that bristles with intelligence and shimmers with romance as it tests the boundary between history and myth.

Patrick Lewis arrives in Toronto in the 1920s as an immigrant from Canada's backwoods. In this throbbing, polyglot city he earns his living searching for a vanished millionaire and tunneling beneath Lake Ontario. He falls in love with two actresses. In the course of his adventures, Patrick's life intersects with those of characters who reappear in THE ENGLISH PATIENT, including the orphaned girl Hana and the charmed thief Caravaggio. And out of these branching, doubling stories, Ondaatje creates a dreamlike and surreal world. IN THE SKIN OF A LION is a work of unalloyed enchantment, beautifully written and prodigiously imagined.

Bristling with intelligence and shimmering with romance, this novel tests the boundary between history and myth. Patrick Lewis arrives in Toronto in the 1920s and earns his living searching for a vanished millionaire and tunneling beneath Lake Ontario. In the course of his adventures, Patrick's life intersects with those of characters who reappear in Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning The English Patient.

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	Description Publisher's Notes With this dazzling predecessor to his Booker Prize-winning THE ENGLISH PATIENT, Michael Ondaatje gives us a novel that bristles with intelligence and shimmers with romance as it tests the boundary between history and myth. Patrick Lewis arrives in Toronto in the 1920s as an immigrant from Canada's backwoods. In this throbbing, polyglot city he earns his living searching for a vanished millionaire and tunneling beneath Lake Ontario. He falls in love with two actresses. In the course of his adventures, Patrick's life intersects with those of characters who reappear in THE ENGLISH PATIENT, including the orphaned girl Hana and the charmed thief Caravaggio. And out of these branching, doubling stories, Ondaatje creates a dreamlike and surreal world. IN THE SKIN OF A LION is a work of unalloyed enchantment, beautifully written and prodigiously imagined. Bristling with intelligence and shimmering with romance, this novel tests the boundary between history and myth. Patrick Lewis arrives in Toronto in the 1920s and earns his living searching for a vanished millionaire and tunneling beneath Lake Ontario. In the course of his adventures, Patrick's life intersects with those of characters who reappear in Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning The English Patient. Reviews "Ondaatje's novels fasciante me because as his stories develop, layers fall away from his characters as if they are being undressed." Patrick Stewart Commentary This novel about an immigrant's surreal adventures in Toronto includes characters who reappear in Ondaatje's novel THE ENGLISH PATIENT: the orphan Hana and the thief Caravaggio.