Shyam Selvadurai
Funny Boy
(Vintage)

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Synopsis

Funny Boy is the remarkable literary debut of Shyam Selvadurai. Set in Sri Lanka, it is a haunting novel, told in six beautifully rendered stories, about a boy growing up within an extended upper-middle-class Tamil family in Colombo, during the seven years leading up to the 1983 riots. Selvadurai subtly juxtaposes a boy's passage to adolescence and maturity with the upheavals of growing political unrest. The result is a novel about discovery and leave-taking, while time and time again the true longings of the human heart come up against the way things are.

Biography

Shyam Selvadurai was born in 1965 in Colombo, Sri Lanka. He moved to Canada at the age of nineteen with his family after the 1983 riots in Colombo. He now lives in Toronto and is the author of Funny Boy and Cinnamon Gardens

Contributors Testimonials

Funny Boy is a highly praised novel that records the life of an idiosyncratic boy who likes to dress up in his mother's sari.  What the reader gets is a charming picture of a young boy growing up, entering into disputes with familiy, friends and finally negotiating the complexities of adolescence.  THis is not just a simple coming out novel, however,  or even a novel of adolescent angst.  Selvadurai places the life of Arjie against the horrors of the interethnic strife in Sri Lanka of the 1980s - the deaths, disappearances and chaos of the time.  He does not make grand historical claims - but shows the effect within the walls of the domestic setting.  Raad as a book of short stories, or as a novel - this is a funny and touchingly resonant work.

Royce Mahawatte