A coming-of-age story in Sixties Sri Lanka by the Man Booker Prize-shortlisted author of Reef Ceylon is on the brink of change. But young Kairo is at loose ends. School is closed, the government is in disarray, the press is under threat, and the religious right are flexing their muscles. Kairo’s hardworking mother blows off steam at her cha-cha-cha classes; his Trotskyist father grumbles over the state of the nation between his secret bets on horse races in faraway England. All Kairo wants to do is hide in his room and flick through secondhand westerns and superhero comics, or escape on his bicycle and daydream. Then he meets the magnetic teenage Jay, and his whole world is turned inside out. A budding naturalist and a born rebel, Jay keeps fish and traps birds for an aviary he is building in the garden of his grand home. As Jay guides Kairo from the realm of make-believe into one of hunting guns and fast cars and introduces him to a girl—Niromi—Kairo begins to understand the price of privilege and embarks on a journey of devastating consequence. Taut and luminous, graceful and wild, Suncatcher is a poignant coming-of-age novel about difficult friendships and sudden awakenings set among the tumult of 1960s Sri Lanka, that confirms Gunesekera’s status as one of today’s most lyrical writers.
Author
Romesh Gunesekera was born in Sri Lanka where he spent his early years. Before coming to Britain he also lived in the Philippines. He now lives in London. In 2010 he was writer in residence at Somerset House. His first novel, Reef, was published in 1994 and was short-listed as a finalist for the Booker Prize, as well as for the Guardian Fiction Prize. In the USA he was nominated for a New Voice Award. Before that, in 1992 his first collection of stories, Monkfish Moon, was one of the first titles in Granta’s venture into book publishing. It was shortlisted for several prizes and named a New York Times Notable Book for 1993. In 1998, he received the inaugural BBC Asia Award for Achievement in Writing & Literature for his novel The Sandglass. The previous year he was awarded one of the prestigious Italian literary prizes: the Premio Mondello Five Continents. In 1995 he won the Yorkshire Post Best First Work Award in Britain. His third novel, Heaven’s Edge, a dystopian novel set in the near future was published by Bloomsbury in 2002. Four years later Bloomsbury also published The Match hailed as one of the first novels in which cricket was celebrated, and a forerunner of the many cricket-related novels that have followed. In 2008, a collection of his Madeira stories were published in a bilingual edition to celebrate its 500th anniversary of the founding of Funchal in Madeira. His most recent novel is Suncatcher. His other books are Noontide Toll, a collection of linked stories, and the historical novel The Prisoner of Paradise. Romesh Gunesekera is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and has also received a National Honour in Sri Lanka. He has been a judge for a number of literary prizes including the Caine Prize for African Writing, the David Cohen Literature Prize and the Forward Prize for Poetry. He has been a Guest Director at the Cheltenham Festival, an Associate Tutor at Goldsmiths College and on the Board of the Arvon Foundation for writing.
