The Collected Works of Billy the Kid

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

"The Collected Works of Billy the Kid strains one's powers of description...Ondaatje's eye for detail is wonderful and he uses it poetically, with superb restraint."

Moving and tragic...Ondaatje is a poet and even his prose moves with rhythmic circular precision.

Ondaatje provides us with a stunning display of his storytelling-visceral, violent, sensuous.

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.

"Ondaatje's novel about Billy the Kid (William Bonney) reads like a diary blended with historical accounts. Stefan Rudnicki strikes a tone that's thoughtful and poetic, visceral and violent. It serves both the straightforward storytelling and the musings, as when Bonney describes the deaths he has seen or his calm as he 'burned out' a fever. While he's mainly reading as Billy the Kid, interludes in the voices of the others in Bonney's life let Rudnicki show off his vocal talents. This is fiction, but it feels like it's real, making for a dramatic listening experience."

"Imagine yourself sitting by a fire, listening to a tale retold by an articulate relative. This is the atmosphere [Ondaatje] creates...Any account of one of the Wild West's most infamous outlaws can't fail to excite, and Ondaatje repeatedly finds the striking detail to evince a bygone era of American life. Particularly good is the depiction of Billy's complicated relationship with his eventual assassin...The clarity and lyricism of this slim volume is well worth the two hours it takes to read."

From the Booker Prize-winning author of The English Patient comes a visionary novel about an icon of American violence.

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 imagines Billy's passage across the blasted landscape of 1880s 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.