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In the Ottawa airport bookstore, after a few weeks in the woods, I picked up the paperback of Michael Ondaatje’s “The English Patient.” At the time I knew nothing of the writer. Too, I was traveling with my two small boys. An hour into the flight I looked up, so taken by the story and writing I’d forgotten where I was, and who I needed to care for. What a story! Set in North Africa as World War Two began, and in Italy as the war came to a close…a man burned beyond recognition, a kind nurse, a thief with no thumbs, two bomb diffusers…the backstory of a marriage undone by a torrid affair. I was dangerously hooked.

Since then I’ve read other Ondaatje novels (“Anil’s Ghost,” “Divisadero”) but none gripped me like “The English Patient.” (I loved the movie, too.)

“The Cat’s Table” is Ondaatje’s latest book. It’s worth a read. The author has said it’s not a memoir, but it reads like one. Michael, an 11 year old boy, boards the ocean liner “Oronsay” for the three week journey from Ceylon to London, where he’ll join his mother. The year is 1954. The ship has seven levels, 600 passengers, a jail for its sole prisoner, pools, a kennel and endless ways for a boy and his two-same age mates to get into trouble, daily.

The book’s title comes from the insignificant table Michael and his friends are assigned for dinner, the “cat’s table.”

Michael and his friends take early morning swims in the forbidden First Class pool, spy on the manacled prisoner, smuggle a dog aboard. During a storm the boys lash themselves to lifeboats, enraging the ship’s captain.

The boy is a wide-eyed guide: “All of us were longing for the sight of land, and as morning broke we lined up along the bow to watch the ancient city approach, mirage-like out of the arc of dusty hills. Aden…was mentioned in the Old Testament. It was where Cain and Abel were buried…it had cisterns built out of volcanic rock, a falcon market, an oasis quarter, an aquarium, a section of town given over to sail makers…It would be our last footstep in the East.”

Mostly, though, Michael and his friends find themselves enchanted by their fellow passengers: Michael’s beautiful teenage cousin Emily, the very proper family friend Flavia Prin, the delightful spinster Miss Lasqueti, who lounges on deck chairs reading detective novels, throwing a book overboard if it fails to please. Scholars, entertainers, the keeper of the kennels. Also, a mute girl whose father is the imprisoned passenger; their deadly escape punctuates the journey.

Woven into the story is the adult Michael finding again his boyhood shipmates in London, his romance and marriage to one of their sisters, reuniting with Emily again at the far side of Canada.

This is not a straightforward story, but it pleases. I was especially moved — to tears! — by the boy Michael’s reunion with his long-lost mother.