Showing all 4 books
Piyumi Segarajasingham is a young barrister in eighties London, half Tamil and half Sinhalese, and newly responsible for her family’s share of an inheritance in Sri Lanka. The servants’ quarters of a house called Serendipity in Colombo’s colonial quarter, Cinnamon Gardens, is now her charge—she wants to keep it, her relatives are keen to sell. So begins Piyumi’s journey home, full of a host of memorable characters and the hilarious ...
In this extraordinary debut, Ashok Ferry chronicles, in a gently probing voice, the journeys of characters seeking something beyond the barriers of nations and generations. His tales of social-climbing Sri Lankans, of the pathos of immigration, of rich people with poor taste, of ice-cream karma, of innocent love, eternity, and more take us to Colombo’s nouveau riche, hoity-toity returnees, ladies with buttery skin and square fingernails, old-fashioned ...
Our Sri Lankan narrator visits his friend Joe in Italy, where Joe attends a special course—in higher (or, shall we say, lower) studies in women. Italians—much like Sri Lankans—live at home through marriage, death, and sometimes even beyond the pale. An accompanying string of fake fiancés and phoney engagements are the backdrop to this delightful collection of darkly humorous tales about Sri Lankans at home and abroad. Long years and many ...
The title story, set against the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004 describes Veena Patel’s all-too-brief encounter with forbidden love. ‘But Did I Tell You I Can’t Dance?’ is a hilarious fable about old age, its occasional humiliations and its many heartwarming victories. And in ‘Maleeshya’ Ashok himself makes a cameo appearance as a dead author who has embarrassingly come back to life.
Love in the Tsunami brings together a selection ...