"Eloquent, oblique, witty, full of light and feeling.Ondaatje's knowledge of the fragility
and luck of life is very clear. So, too, is the grace and originality of his prose."New Yorker

"With a prose style equal to the voluptuousness of [its] subject and a sense of humor never too far
away, Running in the Family is sheer reading pleasure."Washington Post Book World

In the late 1970s, Michael Ondaatje, author of The English Patient, returned to his native island
of Sri Lanka. Recording his journey through the drug-like heat and intoxicating fragrances of that "pendant
off the ear of India," Ondaatje simultaneously retraces the baroque mythology of his Dutch-Ceylonese
family. It is a story of broken engagements and drunken suicide attempts, of parties where exquisitely
dressed couples tango in the jungle, a tale whose actors pursue lives of Baudelairean excess with
impeccable decorum.

Lyrical and witty, tragic and deliriously romantic, Running in the Family is an inspired marriage of
travel narrative and family memoir by one of our most poetic writers.