The Last Colonial: Curious Adventures & Stories from a Vanishing World is a captivating mosaic of memoir, travel writing, and colonial history by Christopher Ondaatje, a man whose life bridges empire and modernity. Born in Ceylon to a tea-planting family, Ondaatje’s journey from the plantations of the tropics to the boardrooms of London and the wildernesses of Africa and Asia mirrors the fading rhythms of the British Empire itself.
 
In this collection of vividly told stories, Ondaatje recounts his early life in Ceylon, his struggles as a young émigré in postwar England and Canada, and his later adventures as an explorer and biographer of literary giants such as Ernest Hemingway, Leonard Woolf, and Sir Richard Burton. Woven through these tales are encounters with superstition, survival, and the search for identity in a world in flux.
 
With an introduction by Michael Holroyd and haunting illustrations by Ana Maria Pacheco, The Last Colonial is both an intimate self-portrait and an elegy to a vanished colonial world — rich in character, memory, and the wonder of discovery.