The Cats Table First American Edition Michael Ondaatje by Michael Ondaatje 9780307700117, 0307700119 instant download after payment.

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

"Ondaatje writes with considerable tenderness of children who are all but abandoned, and at his best he lands squarely in Conrad territory, a place that smells of frankincense and in which “clotted clouds speckled the sky” and sandstorms blow out to sea from distant deserts—just the sort of place, in other words, that a reader wants to inhabit."  -  Kirkus Reviews

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. 

"These pages don’t simply capture viscerally the eleven-year-olds joy at discovery, or his unspeakable fears, or his first stirrings of desire - although to do that successfully is in itself a rarer achievement than one might wish to believe. They also emanate, like a scent, the melancholy of age, the tender wistfulness with which a man over sixty sees again the vistas of his childhood…"  -  Claire Messud, The New York Review of Books

As the narrative moves between the decks and holds of the ship and the boy's adult years, it tells a spellbinding story about the magical, often forbidden, discoveries of childhood and a lifelong journey that begins unexpectedly with a spectacular sea voyage