In his first novel in seven years, Michael Ondaatje picks up where he left off by returning to the themes he likes best: loss, memory, and love. With vivid lyricism and moments of intense insight, his latest novel is an expansive project, charting the connections that join lives over many decades.

Divisadero opens on a farm in California, where the main voice of the novel, Anna, grows up with her father, her adopted sister Claire, and an adopted farmhand, Coop. In a moment that repeats throughout the novel, the notion of family falls apart when Anna and Coop have a brush with adulthood, in the form of a secret life together. Discovery leads to a violent incident that reverberates as the family is divided.

From there, Ondaatje continues as he has in his other works, mapping the intersections of seemingly unrelated lives and the remnants of memory that follow them. Coop finds a home in the casinos of Tahoe, but is stalked by violence until he has a chance reunion with Claire. We meet an adult Anna, who moves to Southern France to study the life of a once-famous writer by collecting the traces and people he left behind.

Unlike The English Patient or Anil's Ghost, both of which were set during wartime, this work lacks a strong external framework. The stories in Divisadero are much more loosely woven together, leaving it to the reader to trace the parallel lives and the echoes they share. While Ondaatje's characters emerge strongly (continuing his trend of well-written heroines), their stories are left with loose ends.

Nevertheless, Ondaatje continues to excel at revealing how violence is absorbed through memory. Whether the products of war or loss, brutal moments set his characters' lives on collision courses or drive them irrevocably apart. Divisadero assembles discerning portraits of haunted, familiar souls who are married to their memories, doing what they must in solitary attempts at understanding.

-Lauren Sommer