A general overview
"Running in the Family, a heartfelt memoir honoring his family and heritage blends together family stories with poems, photographs, and personal anecdotes. As his family history follows a path leading from the genteel innocence of the Ceylonese privileged class as the sun set on the British Empire to the harsh glare of the modern age, so Ondaatje's narrative seeks the inner character of his father, a man of whom the author writes, 'My loss was that I never spoke to him as an adult'" (Chen).