Publisher: Random House India
Rights Available: World (excluding Indian subcontinent)
It is the 1980s and the thirty-year-old civil war in Sri Lanka has only just begun. Piyumi Segarajasingham, young London barrister – half-Tamil, half-Sinhalese – returns to Sri Lanka to take charge of her family’s share of the inheritance – the ancestral house in Colombo’s colonial quarter, Cinnamon Gardens, called Serendipity. There, Piyumi meets a whole cast of characters. And so begins this blackest of black ensemble comedies. There is, of course, an election.
The central question – will the young lovers Piyumi and Marek ever get together? – is overshadowed by the novel’s events and its other characters, who dance an ever more frenzied, ever more hysterical dance of death: a metaphor for the lives all Sri Lankans at the time the novel was written, in the last months of a horrendous thirty-year-war.
