Publishers Weekly
01/13/2020
Gunesekera’s engrossing coming-of-age tale (after Noon Tide Toll) explores the porous class boundaries in 1960s Ceylon. After schools close in the city of Columbo due to government upheaval, preteen Kairo fills his time hanging out with an older, enigmatic wealthy boy named Jay. Kairo is intrigued by Jay’s aquariums and aviary, and after watching a bird take flight, he muses on the time he’d spent “waiting for someone like Jay to turn up and switch on the lights.” As Kairo spends more time with Jay and Jay’s uncle Elvin, who considers himself a refined gentleman and is the owner of an extensive gun collection and numerous cars, Jay introduces Kairo to fishing and hunting, and the younger boy begins identifying with Jay’s grand lifestyle. In addition, Kairo is fascinated by Jay’s beautiful mother, who drinks in the daytime and has an antagonistic relationship with Jay’s father. As Jay’s family falls apart and Jay becomes despondent over the disappearance of their favorite bird, Kairo realizes that while his own family lacks the wealth and eccentricity of Jay’s family, their stability is worth appreciating. Gunesekera successfully captures an adolescent’s cravings for a wealthy lifestyle and the ensuing loss of innocence in the face of tumult. This will move readers. (Mar.)
From the Publisher
Praise for Suncatcher:
"As a coming-of-age novel, Suncatcher is memorable and sometimes brilliant in its ability to map the tensions between leader and follower, the arc and trajectory of boys trying so impatiently to become men. This is also a wise and poignant portrait of a country—Ceylon before it became Sri Lanka—caught in the moment before it loses its innocence."
—Financial Times
"Gunesekera's prose is lush yet luminously clear, and Kairo—as he deciphers the world around him and his place in that world—is the perfect guide to the book's turbulent setting."—Boston Globe
"An enchanting novel. . . . [It] calls to mind the early chapters of Brideshead Revisited . . . [and offers a] magical evocation of a world where it seems that everything should remain as it is, while you know sadly, that it can't and won't."—Allan Massie, The Scotsman
"A gripping novel about [a] country on the brink. . . . Harking back to the 1960s in a period piece suffused with foreboding, Gunesekera captures the first rumblings of the cataclysm."—Peter Kemp, The Sunday Times (London)
"[An] engrossing coming-of-age tale. . . . Gunesekera successfully captures an adolescent's cravings for a wealthy lifestyle and the ensuing loss of innocence in the face of tumult. This will move readers."
—Publishers Weekly
"A lyrical and evocative portrait of a Sri Lankan boyhood friendship and the life lessons that came with it."—Kirkus Reviews
"Gunesekera's latest is an entrancing examination of how we are marked by our earliest friendships and how‚ even in the closest relationships‚ it is difficult to know if those we love are capable of loving us back."—Booklist
Kirkus Reviews
2019-11-11
A young boy comes of age against a backdrop of class conflict and political unrest in 1960s Sri Lanka.
Gunesekera (Noontide Toll, 2014, etc.) sets his latest in Sri Lanka in 1964—then known as Ceylon—as uncertainty looms for the fledgling democracy and ethnic Sinhalese nationalism is on the rise. In the novel's opening pages, narrator Kairo meets Jay, two boys riding their bikes in a church parking lot in the capital city of Colombo. Charismatic Jay challenges Kairo to a race, and the dynamic of their brief boyhood friendship is established: "I needed a guide, a hero, illumination," Kairo explains. "Jay, I now know, needed an acolyte." The middle-class son of a disillusioned socialist father in the Labour Department and a mother who works at Radio Ceylon, Kairo drifts in a dream world of pulp Western comics until he is swept into Jay's glamorous orbit (the Gatsby echo must be intentional). Jay's family home is grand enough to have a name, Casa Lihiniya; his mother, Sonya, drifts about in a caftan like a film star, and his uncle Elvin maintains a fleet of cars and runs a coconut estate in the countryside. Jay himself collects fish in tanks and birds in a backyard aviary. A vivid set piece takes the boys to Elvin's estate, where a game of Cowboys and Indians, played with the son of an estate laborer, turns ugly and Kairo has his first intimations of class privilege: "I could see how easily [Jay] could slip into his uncle's place one day: inherit this estate and loom over the shorter lives of less favoured people." The story winds its unhurried way to a dramatic conclusion, although a subplot involving a girl who comes between the two friends never quite comes into focus.
A lyrical and evocative portrait of a Sri Lankan boyhood friendship and the life lessons that came with it.
