Warlight by Michael Ondaatje

This was long listed for the Booker Prize and it is by one of a group of favorite authors (in reading it I realized that I have missed a couple of his more recent books, so will have to rectify that).  And I was not disappointed.
The novel opens in 1945. Nathaniel, who is 14, and his sister, Rachel, have been left by their parents in London, in the care of a mysterious figure called the Moth. The book is partly in that time period and partly in the future looking back on that time period, which was both traumatic for the children and also not what it seemed to them at the time.  They felt abandoned by their parents into the hands of sketchy guardians, and while there are elements of truth to that as Nathaniel finds out later, there is a lot more going on than that. 
Ondaatje has a series of works that look at broken childhoods that are poorly remembered and even worse to have experienced, and within that framework this one is not amongst the most traumatized, but the things that we do to each other and war are both very much within his wheel house, and this book is no different.  Well written, and I hope that it at least gets to the Booker short list.