The Collected Works of Billy the Kid

'Ondaatje is a poet and even his prose moves with rhythmic, circular precision a good little book, carefully crafted, thoroughly literate' New York Times Book Review 'A compassionate and convincing portrait not only of a savage individual but of the casually brutal human wilderness in which Billy was both villain and victim Sharply conceived and brilliantly carried through' Times Literary Supplement 'Wonderful Ondaatje's language is clean and energetic, with the pop of bullets. This is literature, art' Annie Dillard 'Ondaatje's eye for detail is wonderful and he uses it poetically, with superb restraint' Larry McMurtry, author of The Last Picture Show

William Bonney first killed another man when he was just twelve. By the time he was twenty-one he had slain nineteen more. He was known as Billy the Kid, a bloodthirsty outlaw; a boy with buck teeth and a pleasant face who could shoot a stranger in the heart and calmly walk away while birds ravaged the corpse. Drawing on contemporary accounts, photographs, dime novels and his own imagination, Ondaatje takes you inside the mind of Billy the Kid, tracing his bloody passage across the blasted landscape of New Mexico and through the battles with his captor and eventual killer, Pat Garrett.