LATEST SALES & OFFERS: PROMOTIONS
Tissa Abeysekara was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka, in 1939. He began writing fiction in his native Sinhala the late 1950's, but for the next thirty years devoted his professional life to film and television, becoming one of the country's most respected screenwriters and directors. In 1997, at the age fifty-eight, he published the novella Bringing Tony Home, which went on to win Sri Lanka's esteemed Gratiaen Prize, an annual award for the best novel in English given by a trust established by Michael Ondaatje. In addition to many screenplays for television and film, Abeysekara is the author of the novel, In My Kingdom of the Sun and the Holy Peak, Pitagamkarayo (The Outsiders), and the collection of short short essays, Roots, Reflections and Reminiscences. He is currently the Director of the Television Training Institute of Sri Lanka.
Sri Lankan director-turned-novelist Abeysekara (In My Kingdom of the Sun and the Holy Peak, 2004, etc.) evocatively combines fiction and autobiography in an award-winning novella and three short stories.Impressions of youth - painful lessons learned, emotions intensely experienced and adulthood broached - are reconsidered from the perspective of maturity in these long, sensuously detailed fictions. Like the author, the narrator of the eponymous novella is a TV director making a 12-hour series called The Outsiders, remembering and revisiting his childhood landscape. When the narrator's family fell on hard times and had to move into a smaller home in a different village, his beloved dog Tony was left behind. The boy made a heroic attempt to rescue his pet but fell ill in the process, and Tony disappeared. Later, he found Tony again, but only to take a heart-wrenching farewell. Returning after 46 years, the director finds the scenery altered, yet alive with memory and a sense of melancholy. The narrator looks back wistfully in the other stories as well. Poor Young Man records his anxious and angry attitude toward his father, whose fortunes faded and who concealed mysteries. In Elsewhere, a schoolboy's attraction to an outcast girl is revived in adulthood and recollected painfully decades later. The final story, Hark, the Moaning Pond, considers, through reminiscences of the narrator's grandmother, the culture of Sri Lanka and the birth of shame.A sophisticated jigsaw of a book, sensitively - sometimes stiflingly - mixing memory and history with regret and rites of passage. (Kirkus Reviews)
