Anil Tissera, a forensic anthropologist born in Sri Lanka and educated in England and America, finds herself in the midst of a complicated mystery when she is sent back to her home country by an international human rights group to discover the source of an organized campaign of murder on the island.

William Bonney, a.k.a. “Billy the Kid,” killed his first man when he was twelve. By the time he was twenty-one he had, by his own reckoning, slain nineteen more. In the intervening years he had become “Billy the Kid,” bloodthirsty ogre and outlaw saint. Drawing on contemporary accounts, period photographs, dime novels and his own fund of empathy and imagination, Michael Ondaatje traces Billy's passage across the blasted landscape of 1880 New...

Michael, now an adult, recalls the three-week long sea voyage he took as a boy in the early 1950s to meet his mother. During the trip across the Indian Ocean the boy meets a variety of characters on board.

During World War II, a mysterious stranger is rescued from a fiery plane crash. The American allies care for him and the dangerous secrets from his past come to light.