In Michael Ondaatje's beloved family memoir, fact and fiction blur to
create a dazzlingly original portrait of a lost time and place. Ondaatje
left Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) at the age of eleven. Almost twenty-five years
later, he returned to sort out the recollected fragments of experience,
legend, and family scandal, and to reconstruct the carefree, doomed life
his parents and grandparents had led in a place where couples danced the
tango in the moonlight, where drink, gambling, and romance were the main
occupations of the upper class. Rich with eccentric characters and
captivating stories, and set against the exotic landscape of a colonial
empire in decline, Running in the Familyis Ondaatje's unforgettable journey
through memory and imagination to reclaim his past.