INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Included on The Guardian’s Best Recent Poetry • Shortlisted for the 2025 Al & Eurithe Purdy Poetry Prize • One of the Globe and Mail's most anticipated books of 2024 • Longlisted for the 2024 UK Poet Laureate's Laurel Prize • Named a Best Book of 2024 by Winnipeg Free Press

“The dazzling latest by Ondaatje (The Story) brings his formidable literary gifts and imagination to bear on questions of memory and artistic process. Tenderly plumbing friends, ex-lovers, works of art, and ‘echoing rivers where we lost and found ourselves,’ he writes of ‘all those small recalls of this and that/ before our walk up a staircase into the dark.’ [...] This collection radiates the joy of a fully realized, literary life.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Michael Ondaatje’s latest collection is impossibly good. It is the work of a mature poet at the zenith of his talent. . . . The sheer weight of both allegory and allusion demands and requires contemplation. This is a book of time and tribute, elegy and ekphrasis, with the intricacy of a Roman mosaic tile. . . . A Year of Last Things is a collection that bears multiple and complex readings. Ondaatje’s finest.”
—Micheline Maylor, Quill & Quire (starred review)

“The Sanskrit language becomes coinage and Ondaatje turns up gold. . . . [He] is a connoisseur—and creator—of atmospheres. This valedictory collection brims with rivers—rivers not so much like Lethe as ones that remember. At their best, his poems take you into an elsewhere.”
—Kate Kellaway, The Guardian

“A powerful, thoughtful collection of observations and contemplations; a beautiful and valuable addition to the world of poetry by one of its most inspiring writers.”
—Library Journal

"Each new book of Michael Ondaatje’s is a literary event, but that is particularly true for his books of poetry. In A Year of Last Things he comes close to writing something like a timeless poem, 'a memory poem' that reflects outside and inside time at the same moment, recording the mercurial, mysterious feeling of being alive. The poems become intimate, unresolved stories, loyal to feeling and presence, the lyricism of dreams applied to narratives of lives and landscapes. A Year of Last Things is a remarkable, incomparable new collection."
—Terrance Hayes

"Michael Ondaatje’s love of the world and its wonders, the kindness he offers, the elegant lyricism of his sentences, the joy of storytelling . . . restore belief in the beauty and power of literature and, by extension, of humanity."
—Aleksandar Hemon

"Michael Ondaatje defies the normal distinction between poet and novelist. His writing is consistently turned to a visionary pitch."
—Graham Swift

"My life always stops for a new book by Michael Ondaatje."
—Jhumpa Lahiri