The Cat's Table

The Cat's Table is a novel by the Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje, published in 2011. It was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and it draws on the author's own childhood voyage from Sri Lanka to England.

The ship is the Oronsay, and the route runs across the Indian Ocean, through the Suez Canal and into the Mediterranean. Michael, the narrator, is unaccompanied, and the table he is assigned to is a mixture of adults who have been pushed to the edge of the ship's social order and two other boys, Cassius and Ramadhin, who become his companions.

What the boys find is a world with its own rules. One of the men at the table talks to them about jazz and women, another opens a door onto literature, a cousin of Michael's becomes his confidante at a point in his life when he needs one, and a passenger who seems unremarkable turns out to be something else. The novel is told by the boy as a man looking back, so the voyage is both the adventure it was and the thing he now understands it to have been.