The cover of Michael Ondaatje’s new novel Warlight shows an archival photo of a 1930s London streetscape bathed in fog. The warm glow of a street lamp struggles to cut through the pea soup, but the details of the scene remain indefinite, blurry, faintly mysterious; the people’s faces shrouded in shadow; the sky grainy and gray on the old-fashioned film. It is at once ominous—anything, one feels, could happen in those alleys—and alluring, a magical space suffused with soft light; a lost landscape to sink into and explore. The novel’s plot is much the same: Set in London in 1945, a city still broken from the Blitz, Warlight is a lyrical journey into the past, illuminating, as its title implies, both the traumas and the possibilities of rebuilding a life after war.

WARLIGHT: A NOVEL by Michael Ondaatje Knopf, 304 pp., $26.95

It seems right to judge an Ondaatje novel by its cover: The characters in his books are voracious readers who delight in covers, plots, pictures, and epigraphs, the little handwritten notes and doodles in the margins. They read histories to understand their own lives. They read fantasies to escape into other worlds. They listen to each other’s stories to stitch together their community. In Ondaatje’s Booker Prize-winning The English Patient, the protagonist, Hana, writes her own story onto a blank page at the back of a book in the library, “in order to collect herself.” She nails together books from the library to fill in gaps in the staircase, literally climbing up on the spines of the authors who came before. Storytelling, Ondaatje insists, is our greatest invention, a subtle form of knowledge, an essential link to other people, an artistic tool with which to create ourselves anew.

Warlight, an entrancing and masterfully crafted story, is itself stuffed full of other stories. It begins with two teenagers, Nathaniel, the narrator, and his sister, Rachel, who are left in the care of a family friend nicknamed The Moth in post-war London. The Moth may or may not be a thief; their parents have disappeared on a secret mission abroad, perhaps connected with the war and its aftermath. The Moth invites his friends to the children’s house every evening, and together they make up a motley crew of misfits surviving at the edges of society. The first part of the book is appropriately titled “A Table Full of Strangers,” echoing the ragtag bunch of friends and refugees in Ondaatje’s last novel, The Cat’s Table.

Nathaniel rightly describes their house as “an amateur theatre company.” As new characters come briefly onstage, they bring with them entire other lives, backstories half-glimpsed through a quick introduction or an offhand comment. The Moth is a hotel manager and classical music lover who slips away at odd hours of the day and plays Schumann’s melancholic Mein Herz ist Schwer late into the night. The Moth’s closest friend, The Darter, an ex-boxer, is a smuggler and raconteur who takes Nathaniel under his wing. Arthur McCash, a small, shy lover of French literature, hints at being a spy during the war and implies that the children are in danger from their mother’s secret mission. A travel writer and geographer named Olive Lawrence leads Nathaniel and Rachel on a walk through a park in the evening, describing the faraway places she’s seen, unfolding “all these landscapes within her.” “Your own story,” she says, “is just one, and perhaps not the important one.” Then Olive disappears on her own journey, sending back only postcards.

No one in the novel is who they appear to be. Everyone wears a mask. The drama is driven by Nathaniel’s efforts, many years later, to peel off those masks, to uncover the real characters of the people who shaped him as he grew up, “that remarkable table full of strangers who had altered me.” In particular, he is trying to remember his mother. She abandons him in London in 1945 and then returns a year or so later to live with him in a small village in the countryside, only to die soon after in mysterious circumstances, leaving him alone again. The novel is meant to be Nathaniel’s memoir of that time, and “when you attempt a memoir,” he explains, “you need to be in an orphan state.”