Reading Michael Ondaatje's latest novel is a bit like settling in with a skilled raconteur as he pages unhurriedly through an old photo album. The novel is structured as a man's reminiscences about what has turned out to be the defining event of his life: a three-week journey by steamship from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to England taken in 1954, when he was 11 years old. (Ondaatje, born in Sri Lanka, made a similar journey as a youth, although he has said the novel isn't especially autobiographical.)

"This journey was to be an innocent story within the small parameter of my youth," muses our narrator, Michael. "With just three or four children at its centre, on a voyage whose clear map and sure destination would suggest nothing to fear or unravel." This, of course, is not the way the trip turns out.

The book's title, The Cat's Table, comes from a phrase describing the place in the dining room that is farthest from the captain's table. Michael and two other boys his age are assigned to this table, along with a micro-community of traveling oddballs, and the story unfolds as the boy (and the reader) gets to know them. Even the minor characters have rich and surprising histories. One man maintains a lush garden hidden deep in the belly of the ship. One plays piano under a pseudonym. One never speaks at all and wears a bandana over his throat. And there's a pale, wallflower-y woman who, the boys learn, is much more than meets the eye. Also on the ship are Michael's cousin Emily, a sparkling beauty; several members of an acrobatic troupe; and a prisoner, an object of instant fascination for the boys. He's said to have killed a judge, and is taken out each evening to walk the deck in his chains.

At first, the adult Michael's reflections on his journey seem to meander: There are lots of gripping stories, but there isn't immediately a clear story arc. It's only much later in the book that you begin to understand how these recollections all fit together, and what a complex and thorough hold that brief journey had over everyone who took it.

One of the first books I reviewed at LJ was Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion, and I have loved him for his luscious language and penetrating insights ever since. So I'm thrilled he has a new novel forthcoming. His hero, an 11-year-old bound for England aboard a ship chugging through the Indian Ocean, finds himself seated during dinner at the unpropitious "cat's table." His tablemates include two other boys, with whom he has some wild adventures, and some outré adults who talk to him of literature, jazz, and women. More than shipboard entertainment, this novel promises to plumb our first painful steps toward growing up. With an 11-city tour, a 100,000-first printing, and a reading group guide

"The journey was to be an innocent story within the small parameter of my youth," says the narrator of his voyage aboard the Oronsay, which carried him through the Indian Ocean to England and his divorced mother. But for 11-year-old Michael, things shift from the moment he is seated at "the cat's table," the least propitious spot in the dining room. Michael enjoys wild escapades with the two other boys at the table, quiet Ramadhin and hell-raiser Cassius, while befriending the mismatched adults at his table as well as his card-playing roommate, who tends the ship's kennels. Others on board include Michael's older cousin Emily, who takes up with the magnetic head of a performing troupe while protecting a deaf and frail-looking girl named Asuntha, and a heavily chained prisoner. The relationship among these four characters precipitates crisis, but we're not led to it systematically; instead, Booker Prize winner Ondaatje (Anil's Ghost) flashes forward to Michael as an adult, showing us how unwittingly we lose our childhood innocence and how that loss comes to affect us much, much later. VERDICT Writing in a less lyrically wrought style than usual, Ondaatje turns in a quietly enthralling work. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 4/4/11.]—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

In Ondaatje's best novel since his Booker Prize–winning The English Patient, an 11-year-old boy sets off on a voyage from Ceylon to London, where his mother awaits. Though Ondaatje tells us firmly in the "Author's Note" that the story is "pure invention," the young boy is also called Michael, was also born in Ceylon, and also grows up to become a writer. This air of the meta adds a gorgeous, modern twist to the timeless story of boys having an awfully big adventure: young Michael meets two children of a similar age on the Oronsay, Cassius and Ramadhin, and together the threesome gets up to all kinds of mischief on the ship, with, and at the expense of, an eccentric set of passengers. But it is Michael's older, beguiling cousin, Emily, also onboard, who allows him glimpses of the man he is to become. As always, Ondaatje's prose is lyrical, but here it is tempered; the result is clean and full of grace, such as in this description of the children having lashed themselves to the deck to experience a particularly violent storm: "our heads were stretched back to try to see how deep the bow would go on its next descent. Our screams unheard, even to each other, even to ourselves, even if the next day our throats were raw from yelling into that hallway of the sea." (Oct. 7)