Book description
It is New Year's Eve, 1982, and the whole gang is at Victor and
Nandini's house.
The Godfather
is on repeat upstairs. Baila music is blaring from the record player in
the lounge. Poppadoms are frying in the kitchen. And Preethi, tipsy on
youth and friendship and covert cigarettes out the window, just wants to belong.
But what does that mean, to belong? Is it: paying over the odds for a
bottle of whisky? Getting lost with your impassive grandmother on the
way home from school? Mourning for Elvis? Adopting a child whose skin is
darker than yours? Marrying an English boy? Learning how to speak in a
voice that doesn't remind you of your father? Feeling awkward at an
office barn dance? Losing your lover, twice? Vowing to destroy the world
and then changing your mind?
Is it something else, just out of reach?
From that New Year's party to a family funeral, via ghetto blasters and
growing pains, through 7/7 and the world according to Charlie Chaplin,
life in all of its complexity happens to Preethi, Nil, Lolly, Rohan, and
their tightly knotted Sri Lankan families in south London. Tracing the
fine lines of politics, tradition and community, Roshi Fernando's
stunning collection of linked stories pulls us back, back, to the
knowledge of home. Roshi Fernando is a virtuoso writer, whose work is
distinguished by unique flair, a powerful style and disciplined artistic
intelligence Roshi Fernando was born in London of Sri Lankan parents.
She has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Swansea. She
won the 2009 Impress Prize for New Writers, was shortlisted for the 2011
Sunday Times
EFG Private Bank Award, longlisted for the 2011 Frank O Connor
International Short Story Prize, was given a special commendation by the
judges of the Manchester Fiction Prize and was longlisted for the
Bridport prize and the Fish prize. Roshi Fernando lives in
Gloucestershire with her husband and four children.
