By Michael Ondaatje
288 pages; Knopf

You need him the way you need ice water: a tight-lipped loner in a black T-shirt who wakes up your senses, then slips from your grasp. Divisadero (Knopf) is Michael Ondaatje's (The English Patient) latest literary seduction, a tale of two sisters who love—and, inevitably, lose—the sexy male enigma known as Coop. An intricate double narrative, mapping landscapes of memory and desire.

— Cathleen Medwick