Amazon.com Book Description (ISBN 0140069666, Paperback)

2 cassettes / 3 hours
Read by Michael Ondaatje

"Michael Ondaatje is here at his agile and evocative best . . . Brightly colored, sweet and painful, bloody-midned and otherworldly, [Running in the Family] achieves the status of legend."
-Margaret Atwood

In the late 1970s, Michael Ondaatje returned to his native island of Sri Lanka.  Recording his journey through he druglike heat and intoxicating fragrances of the "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 eloquent and poetic writers.