In the Skin of a Lion

Toronto in the 1920s and 30s, built by immigrant workers — Finnish loggers, Greek construction workers, Italian tilers — whose names appear in no official history. Patrick Lewis moves through this world looking for a missing millionaire and finding instead the invisible labor that made a city. Ondaatje writes in prose so precise it reads like poetry. A dispatch about the city as a collective achievement that the official history attributes to the men who financed it rather than the men who built it.