The Collected Works of Billy the Kid

Booker-prize winning author Michael Ondaatje invites you on a brutal, beautiful journey into the American West - and the life and death of its most infamous outlaw.

By the age of twenty-one, Billy the Kid had killed a man for each year he'd been alive. Then he was shot dead in the night by a man he once called a friend.

Drawing on contemporary accounts, period photographs, dime novels, and his own prodigious fund of empathy and imagination, Michael Ondaatje's visionary novel traces the legendary outlaw's passage across the blasted landscape of 1880 New Mexico and the collective unconscious of his country. The Collected Works of Billy the Kid is a virtuoso synthesis of storytelling, history, and myth by a writer who brings us back to our familiar legends with a renewed sense of wonder.

Reviews:

'Moving and tragic... Ondaatje is a poet and even his prose moves with rhythmic circular precision.' - The New York Times Book Review

'Wonderful... Ondaatje's language is clean and energetic, with the pop of bullets. This is literature, art.' - Annie Dillard

'At once violent and sensuous, calloused and tender.' - Granta

'Ondaatje's eye for detail is wonderful and he uses it poetically, with superb restraint.' - Larry McMurtry