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Funny Boy
Shyam Selvadurai
Novel, 1994
Coming-of-age novel set in Colombo that follows a Tamil boy through the build-up to the 1983 anti-Tamil riots.
Books set in Sri Lanka
Seven books by writers from Sri Lanka, set there, that give a real sense of the place, starting with Funny Boy and Running in the Family.
About the literature of Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka's best-known recent novel is Shehan Karunatilaka's The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, winner of the Booker Prize in 2022. It is a darkly comic afterlife mystery set in Colombo in 1990, amid civil war death squads. Writing on the island goes back to the Mahavamsa, an ancient chronicle of its kings composed in Pali, the language of Buddhist scriptures. Today writers work in Sinhala, Tamil and English, and the civil war that began in 1983 and ended in 2009 shadows much recent fiction.
Shyam Selvadurai's Funny Boy traces a Tamil boy's coming of age in Colombo as the 1983 anti-Tamil riots approach. Romesh Gunesekera's Reef watches a young houseboy at work in a Colombo marine biologist's home. Michael Ondaatje's memoir Running in the Family recounts his return to Ceylon, the island's name under colonial rule, and the story of his eccentric family.
By writers from Sri Lanka
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Running in the Family
Michael Ondaatje
Memoir, 1982
Memoir of Ondaatje's return to Ceylon, tracing his eccentric Burgher family through colonial-era Colombo, Kandy and the tea country.
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida
Shehan Karunatilaka
Novel, 2022
Darkly comic afterlife mystery set in Colombo in 1990, amid civil war death squads and political terror.
Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew
Shehan Karunatilaka
Novel, 2010
A cricket-obsessed quest through Colombo life that reveals Sri Lankan passions, politics and humour.
Cinnamon Gardens
Shyam Selvadurai
Novel, 1998
Set in 1920s colonial Colombo, it explores class, caste, reform and suppressed desire among the Tamil and Sinhalese elite.
The Road from Elephant Pass
Nihal de Silva
Novel, 2003
A Sinhalese army officer and a Tamil woman travel together through the northern war zone, showing the conflict and the landscape.
Reef
Romesh Gunesekera
Novel, 1994
Novel about a young houseboy in a Colombo marine biologist's home, set against a changing island in the lead-up to ethnic conflict.
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