Homesick
Roshi Fernando
Homesick
It is New Year's Eve, 1982, and the whole gang is at Victor and Nandini's house. The Godfather is on repeat upstairs. Baila music is blaring from the record player in the lounge. Poppadoms are frying in the kitchen. And Preethi, tipsy on youth and friendship and covert cigarettes out the window, just wants to belong. But what does that mean, to belong? Is it: paying over the odds for a bottle of whisky? Getting lost with your impassive grandmother on the way home from school? Mourning for Elvis? Adopting a child whose skin is darker than yours? Marrying an English boy? Learning how to speak in a voice that doesn't remind you of your father? Feeling awkward at an office barn dance? Losing your lover, twice? Vowing to destroy the world and then changing your mind? Is it something else, just out of reach? From that New Year's party to a family funeral, via ghetto blasters and growing pains, through 7/7 and the world according to Charlie Chaplin, life in all of its complexity happens to Preethi, Nil, Lolly, Rohan, and their tightly knotted Sri Lankan families in south London.
4.1 out of 5 based on 5 reviews
|
Omniscore:
|
| Classification |
Fiction |
| Genre |
Short Stories |
| Format |
Hardcover |
| Pages |
304 |
| RRP |
|
| Date of Publication |
March 2012 |
| ISBN |
978-1408826409 |
| Publisher |
Bloomsbury |
| |
It is New Year's Eve, 1982, and the whole gang is at Victor and Nandini's house. The Godfather is on repeat upstairs. Baila music is blaring from the record player in the lounge. Poppadoms are frying in the kitchen. And Preethi, tipsy on youth and friendship and covert cigarettes out the window, just wants to belong. But what does that mean, to belong? Is it: paying over the odds for a bottle of whisky? Getting lost with your impassive grandmother on the way home from school? Mourning for Elvis? Adopting a child whose skin is darker than yours? Marrying an English boy? Learning how to speak in a voice that doesn't remind you of your father? Feeling awkward at an office barn dance? Losing your lover, twice? Vowing to destroy the world and then changing your mind? Is it something else, just out of reach? From that New Year's party to a family funeral, via ghetto blasters and growing pains, through 7/7 and the world according to Charlie Chaplin, life in all of its complexity happens to Preethi, Nil, Lolly, Rohan, and their tightly knotted Sri Lankan families in south London.
Reviews
The Independent
Leyla Sanai
“Roshi Fernando is a powerful new voice of the Asian immigrant experience. Her debut comprises a series of linked stories centred around a cast of characters, some of them Sri Lankan migrants. The book offers complex, mosaic characters and compelling storylines rather than racial stereotypes and sententious proselytising.”
10/04/2012
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The Guardian
Alfred Hickling
“The stories frequently crystallise around a single luminous detail, a jarring intrusion of violence or a bizarrely unexpected development, such as a young boy concealing a turtle's egg which hatches as his family is about to board a plane. The pick of a vibrantly drawn cast is the elderly Gertie, who befriends a suicide bomber and telephones Chris Moyles to give him a piece of her mind: but the binding thread is the recurring story of Preethi, a moody teenager who endures a disastrous marriage to an Englishman.”
30/10/2011
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The Observer
Sophie Martelli
“This collection of short stories juxtaposes the cold violence of 1960s crime with a girl's first day at nursery, while the descent of an immigrant ruined by drinking, loneliness and paedophilic tendencies appears next to a bittersweet tale of teenage growing pains, against a 70s backdrop of Thalidomide and Elvis.”
11/03/2012
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The Sunday Times
Francesca Angelini
“It is no mean literary feat to capture the migrant’s voice. It is an even tougher undertaking to encompass four generations’ worth of such voices in a series of short stories. But Roshi Fernando does just this, providing a debut that can confidently sit alongside the likes of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and Andrea Levy’s Small Island.”
18/03/2012
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The Financial Times
Emily Stokes
“Childhood trysts and teenage kicks are heady affairs, and so perhaps it is no surprise that these stories occasionally verge on the sentimental (an effect exaggerated by Fernando’s reliance on symbols: an egg about to hatch, a bird with an injured wing, a photograph torn in two). But they are also psychologically acute portraits of displacement and its consequences. ”
16/03/2012
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