Acclaimed novelist Ondaatje ( The Cat’s Table, 2011, etc.) returns to familiar ground: a lyrical mystery that plays out in the shadow of World War II.In what is arguably his best-known novel, The English Patient (1992), Ondaatje unfolds at leisurely pace a story of intrigue and crossed destinies at the fringes of a global struggle. If anything, his latest moves even more slowly, but to deliberate effect. As it opens, with World War II grinding to a gaunt end, Nathaniel Williams, 14, and his 15-year-old sister, Rachel, learn that their parents are bound for newly liberated Singapore. Rose, their mother, has made the war years bearable with Mrs.

Warlight: Warlight is a feature-rich strategy game along the lines of Risk, Galcon, or Dice Wars. It features both single and multiplayer modes that include user-made maps (such as Mr. T!) and a host of interesting gameplay additions such as cards and fog of war. You can even play games by e-mail! Warlight is a fabulous gaming experience for fans of the traditional game of Risk and for those.

Miniver–like resoluteness, but the father is a cipher. So he remains. Nathaniel and Rachel, Rose tells them, are to be left in London in the care of some—well, call them associates. They take over the Williams house, a band both piratical and elegant whose characters, from the classically inclined ringleader, The Moth, to a rough-edged greyhound racer, The Pimlico Darter, could easily figure in a sequel to Great Expectations.

“It is like clarifying a fable,” Ondaatje writes in the person of Nathaniel, “about our parents, about Rachel and myself, and The Moth, as well as the others who joined us later.” But that clarification takes a few hundred pages of peering into murky waters: Nathaniel, in adulthood, learns that Rose, who slips back into England soon after sailing away, has been a person of many parts, secretive, in a war that has extended beyond the cease-fire, as partisans battle unrepentant fascists and the early Cold War begins to solidify, a time of betrayal and murder. If Rachel and Nathaniel’s adventures among their surrogate parents, who “did not in any way resemble a normal family, not even a beached Swiss Family Robinson,” are far from innocent, the lives of all concerned have hidden depths and secrets, some shameful, some inviting murderous revenge.Ondaatje’s shrewd character study plays out in a smart, sophisticated drama, one worth the long wait for fans of wartime intrigue. A man straitjacketed in routine blinks when his emotional blinders are removed in Tyler’s characteristically tender and rueful latest ( Clock Dance, 2018, etc.).Micah’s existence is entirely organized to his liking. Each morning he goes for a run at 7:15; starts his work as a freelance tech consultant around 10; and in the afternoons deals with tasks in the apartment building where he is the live-in super. He’s the kind of person, brother-in-law Dave mockingly notes, who has an assigned chore for each day: “vacuuming daydusting day.Your kitchen has a day all its own” (Thursday). Dave’s comments are uttered at a hilarious, chaotic family get-together that demonstrates the origins of Micah’s persnickety behavior and offers a welcome note of comedy in what is otherwise quite a sad tale. Micah thinks of himself as a good guy with a good life.

It’s something of a shock when the son of his college girlfriend turns up wondering if Micah might be his father (not possible, it’s quickly established), and it’s really a shock when his casual agreement to let 18-year-old Brink crash in his apartment for a night leads Micah’s “woman friend,” Cass, to break up with him. “There I was, on the verge of losing my apartment,” she says. “What did you do? Quickly invite the nearest stranger into your spare room.” Indignant at first, Micah slowly begins to see the pattern that has kept him warily distant from other people, particularly the girlfriends who were only briefly good enough for him.

(They were always the ones who left, once they figured it out.) The title flags a lovely metaphor for Micah’s lifelong ability to delude himself about the nature of his relationships. Once he realizes it, agonizing examples of the human connections he has unconsciously avoided are everywhere visible, his loneliness palpable. These chapters are painfully poignant—thank goodness Tyler is too warmhearted an artist not to give her sad-sack hero at least the possibility of a happy ending.Suffused with feeling and very moving.

It happens in the time it takes to read a phrase: an epileptic seizure described as “some deadly shore recently passed.” You understand that the work you’re reading is both more complicated and more beautiful than the otherwise plain prose might indicate.Of course, you already knew that, because you’re reading a book by Michael Ondaatje. Many readers recognize his name primarily because of his bestselling novel “The English Patient,” which was made into the 1996 blockbuster movie that received nine Academy Awards. But while that book shares with this new one a World War II setting, “Warlight” owes more to Ondaatje’s career as a poet than it does to that famous novel.The title alone casts the entire story in an eerie glow; “Warlight” was the official name given to lights allowed on for emergency traffic during blackout hours in Blitz-ridden London.“Warlight” begins as Nathaniel’s story. He is 14 and living with his parents and 16-year-old sister Rachel. It is 1945, the war has just ended, and the parents announce they are heading to Singapore, where the father will take a new position as head of marketing for Unilever Asia. The mother carefully packs her trunk: “We watched as she filled it with frocks, shoes, necklaces, English fiction, maps, along with objects and equipment she did not expect to find in the East.” The siblings are distressed at being left to enter British boarding schools, but more distressed at being left in the care of a very odd family friend, a man they privately refer to as “The Moth.”. The adventures that follow for Nathaniel are triggered both by hormones and by finding, with his sister, their mother’s full, unsent trunk in the basement.

The game’s afoot, but no one will tell them any of its truths. One night, dancing at a club, Nathaniel thinks he glimpses his mother, Rose. She’s supposed to still be in Singapore. Has she returned?

Why would she stay on the periphery of her children’s lives?Not until years later, when Nathaniel has taken an archivist position with British Intelligence — it comes open for him with strange convenience — will he learn some of the answers. Each layer of this unusual family’s history arrives via flickers of memory, and not all the layers are primly opaque: Rachel begins experiencing epilepsy’s grand mal seizures. Barges transport illegal greyhounds to dog tracks. Rose has arms crisscrossed by terrible scars.Despite the spotty parenting, Nathaniel comes to realize how strongly he and Rachel have been cared for. Some of the strange arrangements Ondaatje dreams up and pieces together make it seem as if the whole of Britain were involved in spy craft, that every farmer and member of “Dad’s Army” was fighting for the cause. Especially strong are Nathaniel’s work for and interactions with one Mr.

Malakite, strong as a workhorse but also able to keep a secret as well as any of his colleagues.Props to the Knopf design department for its evocation of the glow on the book jacket, which includes black-and-white photography along with various shades of blush, indicating how sodium lamps might have appeared through fog — and how the novel’s mysterious layers appear and disappear in Nathaniel’s memory. The story’s second half takes a sharp turn, starting with an anecdote about a young boy in a thatching family who fell off a roof and had to be cared for by 8-year-old Rose.

That boy is Marsh Felon, who grows into a “gatherer,” a man who recruits people for intelligence services during wartime and long after.It’s important for Nathaniel to re-create scenes of his mother’s interactions with Felon and other operatives, both to understand her devotion to her trade and to understand the life she lived apart from her children. The result is quite a look at what it was like to be a loyal foot soldier in a war while being a working mother, decades before women were officially allowed as military combatants in most Western countries.Ondaatje has further to go with his artistic purpose, however. As Nathaniel grapples with the documents and information available to him at work, he also grapples with the characters from his past, including the man who smuggled greyhounds, a man Nathaniel and his sister called “The Darter.”Giving too much information about their relationship might be considered a spoiler, but their postwar nighttime river jaunts turn out to have had a more serious purpose than Nathaniel could have known. Which is, at the heart of it, what connects the natural world to the human one of war and intrigue for Ondaatje.

A girlfriend of “The Darter,” Olive Lawrence, is an ethnographer (at least in part), and at one point, she takes Nathaniel and Rachel on nighttime walks in London. As she points out sights and sounds, including cricket hums and the rasping of badger paws, she reminds Nathaniel, “Your own story is just the one, and perhaps not the important one. The self is not the principal thing.” The poetic use of natural imagery in “Warlight” will keep readers ruminating on how easily the world around us adapts to human foibles.And yet, the world is also messy. Nathaniel seeks to create a narrative of the war years, but his life and his stories have plenty of holes. Do we need to obtain answers, this novel asks, or might we learn to relish ambiguity? In a book made lush through layers of experience instead of description, the latter feels possible.Patrick is a writer and critic whose work appears in the Washington Post and on NPR Books.