Product Description
A flamboyant beauty who once partied with the Prince of Wales and who now, in her seventh decade, has "gone native" in a Ceylonese jungle. A proud, Oxford-educated lawyer who unwittingly seals his own professional fate when he dares to solve the sensational Hamilton murder case that has rocked the upper echelons of local society. A young woman who retreats from her family and the world after her infant brother is found suffocated in his crib. These are among the linked lives compellingly portrayed in a novel everywhere hailed for its dazzling grace and savage wit - a spellbinding tale of family and duty, of legacy and identity, a novel that brilliantly probes the ultimate mystery of what makes us who we are.
From Publishers Weekly
De Kretser's accomplished second novel (after 2000's
The Rose Grower), set in the author's native Sri Lanka in the years before its independence in 1948, is as much a haunting character study as it is an elusive murder mystery and a deep exploration of colonialism. At the heart of the story is Sam Obeysekere, a brilliant Ceylonese prosecutor and perfect English gentleman—who isn't, of course, English. Born into a privileged but unstable family—his "Pater" intentionally squanders their wealth; his "Mater" sleeps around, smashes expensive crystal and feels a "massive indifference" to her son; and his beloved sister seems bent on self-destruction—Sam, as an adult, focuses on his young son and his career. By all accounts, he's prospering, able to take his place beside the island's ruling class of Brits, Dutch burghers and Portuguese. But when he offers to help solve the murder of an English tea grower shot dead in the jungle, Sam makes a "central mistake" that destabilizes his life—and, in a way, the English-dominated life of his whole "mongrel" nation. De Kretser's self-deluding protagonist will no doubt remind readers of the butler in
The Remains of the Day: it's a sharp portrayal of assimilation that she manages to make complex and even poignant ("Are we to become a nation capable of talking only to itself, a lunatic on the world stage?"). But Sam is his own unique and problematic self, and like everything else in this lush, uneasy world, from the secondary characters to the ghost-haunted jungle, he is capable of shocking. De Kretser's fine, brooding, mischievous style is sure to captivate fans of serious literary fiction.
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From The Washington Post
Michelle de Kretser's ambitious, gracefully composed second novel might best be described as an enigma wrapped in a mystery. Its title and opening section -- a first-person reminiscence by its central character, a public prosecutor in the former British Indian colony of Ceylon, now Sri Lanka -- prompt readers to expect a straight expository work of detection, in the great and elegant British tradition of Willkie Collins, Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie.
Our narrator, one Sam (né Stanley Alban Marriott) Obeysekere is indeed a diehard fan of the mystery genre, with an emphasis on "the sublime Mrs. Christie" and her serene-yet-bloody sorties into well-born British intrigue. Sam grew up in the Ceylonese capital of Colombo as the son of a high-living native-born estate holder of "iconic largesse," who managed to work the British takeover of the island nation into a mammoth personal land grab. The sight of his father whipping the son of a favored overseer instilled in young Sam a reverence for the cold and impersonal authority of British justice. Even though the boy was being punished unfairly, Sam intuited the workings of a grander design: "It was essential to the harmonious functioning of our little community that the boy paid publicly for his crime [of stealing coconuts] in spite of his privileged standing on the estate." Here was the germination of Sam's adult career as a prosecutor, which though "a stern and thankless