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|title=Divisadero

|author=Michael Ondaatje

|date=August 2008

|isbn=978-0747592686

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In northern California a man's wife died giving birth to his daughter. In the same hospital, in the same week another mother died giving birth and the man brought to his home both Anna, his daughter and Claire the daughter of the other woman who had died. Well, they owed him for the death of his wife, didn't they? Both girls were brought up, if rather distantly, by the man but their emotional support came from Coop. He too was an orphan taken in by the farmer. When he was four, the rest of his family had been murdered on the next-door farm. The child hid in the crawl space under the house and emerged to tell the tale a few days later. And so the four lived and worked and loved and it might have continued had it not been for what happened in a few dreadful minutes. Here's how Anna describes it: