- It is the 1970s in Northern California. A farmer and his teenage daughters, Anna and Claire, work the land with the help of Coop, the enigmatic young man who lives with them. Theirs is a makeshift family, until they are riven by an incident of violence - of both hand and heart. Written in the sensuous prose for which Michael Ondaatje"s fiction is celebrated, Divisadero is the work of a master story-teller.