Michael Ondaatje writes on the skin. From the very title of In the Skin of a Lion, taken from The Epic of Gilgamesh, the reader is confronted with the transitory and mobile quality of the body's surface: skin, the novel suggests, is something to try on or take off. The skin motif is repeated throughout the novel: there are animal skins, painted skins, dusty skins, wounded skins, erotic skins, the skins of migrant workers, the skins of mistresses and the skins of millionaires. Woven from the protagonist's skin stories, the book begins and ends with a journey, during which Patrick tells Hana of his childhood in Depot Creek, where his father worked as a dynamiter. For Hana's benefit, and ours, he recounts his migration to Toronto, where he sets out to find the missing millionaire, Ambrose Small, and where he meets Clara (Small's mistress) and Alice (Clara's friend and Hana's mother). Discovering more about the history of the Macedonian community in which he lives, he begins employment firstly as a dynamiter and then as a leather worker in a tannery, before attempting to blow up the R. C. Harris water treatment plant while grieving the loss of Alice. Made up of shifting stories told slantwise, the novel presents the lives and deaths of marginalised subjects as they transform their individual and collective narratives – uncovering, recovering and discovering possible skins in the process.