18,000 words (72 pages)— Appearances can be deceiving… To Rolf, Mirabay is the city of dreams. Called the Jewel of the West, it is the place of kings and heroes and great deeds. The chance to visit is not an opportunity Rolf is willing to miss. At first glance, the city is everything he expects, but with an appearance and accent more suited to the Marches rather than the refined salons and sophisticated ballrooms of the city, he is met with the prejudice reserved for those from the rural provinces. Dreams and preconceptions rarely meet with reality, however and as the city begins to lose its lustre for Rolf, those he thought him an uncouth blow-in from the Marches learn the error of their ways.

    Henry Oster was just five years old when Adolf Hitler seized power in Germany. As the horrors of the Holocaust unfolded he lost his family, his country and almost everything else a human being can lose. From his liberation in 1945 he started over, building a new life in France and America.

    Her poems take us to the flip side of human consciousness, where anything can happen at any time. Tinged with surrealism, her work makes visionary leaps from the quotidian to sudden, surprising epiphanies.

    our darkest times are where we grow the most, so in this book, i share mine, and together, we learn how to heal.

    By then, it's too late--her family hovers on the brink of financial ruin with another social catastrophe about to explode. But neither can resist an attraction that burns stronger than society's dictates and their lack of trust--his of women--hers from fear of discovery.

    Like a literal road atlas, the poems carry lines and themes from one to the next. Like Atlas holding up the world, they hold patterns of all kinds aloft with an attention that transforms. The poems also are an atlas of the known world, capturing the way events repeat across time and place, as in one poem that links the image of her sister, pausing in her work as housekeeper, with the contours of a maid in a Vermeer painting and a woman just "made over" on that day's episode of Oprah. Vandenberg's poems use family artifacts, memory, and imagination to plot the intersections of love, death, history, art, and desire. In the first section, "Trade Routes," about connections, each poem moves back one generation to investigate the ways events reverberate across time. The second section, "The Red Fields of Lisse (A Love Story)," focuses on a former partner, a hemophiliac with AIDS, and tulips. The third section, "Catalog of Want," contains poems about desire in various guises. The last section, "A Place Ten Years Away," reexamines the themes of the first three sections.

    Ondaatje's prose is at times startlingly lyrical, and as he chases Bolden through documents and scenes, the novel partakes of the very best sort of modern detective novel--one where the enigma is never resolved, but allowed to manifest in its fullness. Though more 'experimental' in form than either The English Patient or In the Skin of a Lion, it is a fitting addition to the renowned Ondaatje oeuvre.