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our pick of the latest books

“Books do not begin with inspiration or ideas, at least not for me,” author Michael Ondaatje tells The Australian Women’s Weekly. “They begin with a fragment of a situation… in the case of Warlight, it is the moment when two children are left behind by their parents to be looked after by two possible criminals – almost a fairytale beginning. And it happens at the end of a war. So how do they live their lives? How do they survive?” This is the fragment that kick-starts his latest novel and at first it feels as if we’re in a Dickensian London, albeit post-WWII, but with all the dark alleys, enigmatic characters and nefarious goings on you might find in Great Expectations. But hang on, there’s so much more to come in this thrilling ride, which flits between 1945 and more than a dozen years later as narrator Nathaniel unpicks his extraordinary family. In Part One we meet the questionable guardians to 14-year-old Nathaniel and his sister Rachel, nearly 16, while their parents sail off to Singapore for a year. There’s the shy, bigframed lodger they call The Moth, his shady, wiry companion The Pimlico Darter, who seems to be involved with the transportation of dodgy greyhounds, and a cast of other extraordinary men and women who drift in and out of their existence. But as soon as Nathaniel grasps one new world order, the sands shift, and where, oh where, is their mother, who by the way didn’t get on that boat! The prose is haunting and vivid with a truly shocking crescendo to the first section. Part Two opens in 1959 with Nathaniel buying a home with a walled garden in rural England. And now we move from social drama to spy thriller as the revelations build thick and fast and so engrossingly that before you know it, darkness has fallen and you’re reading by moonlight to reach a denouement with all the power we’ve come to expect from this accomplished writer. “I invent the characters as I go along,” the author says. “They become more complex and interesting (hopefully) as the book progresses, the way we get to know people in real life.” Getting to know these characters is fascinating.