One of the most acclaimed debuts of the year - a rumbustuous, brilliant novel about Sri Lanka, cricket and the search for a legendary sportsman
Shehan Karunatilaka is the multi-award winning author of two novels. He won the Commonwealth Book Prize and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature for his debut novel, Chinaman- The Legend of Pradeep Mathew. He won the Booker Prize 2022 for his second novel, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. In addition to his novels he has written rock songs, screenplays and travel stories.
The strength of the book lies in its energy, its mixture of humour
and heartwrenching emotion, its twisting narrative, its playful use
of cricketing facts and characters, and its occasional blazing
anger about what Sri Lanka has done to itself... * Guardian *
Carries real weight...a mixture of, say, CLR James, Gabriel Garcia
Marquez, Fernando Pessoa and Sri Lankan arrack...essential to
anyone with a taste for maverick genius * The Times *
Karunatilaka has a real lightness of touch. He mixes humour and
violence with the same deftness with which his protagonist mixes
drinks * Observer *
Chinaman is a debut bristling with energy and confidence, a
quixotic novel that is both an elegy to lost ambitions and a paean
to madcap dreams * Sunday Times *
Chinaman's free-wheeling, zany tempo is part of its charm
too. Its picaresque action, mainly based in Colombo and narrated in
short bite-sized chunks, gives a vibrant comic pulse to Sri Lankan
life, even though Karunatilaka's portrait of the country is
scathing...it confirms that cricket, a game that is largely played
in the head and inhabits a bizarrely detailed parallel world to our
own, is ideally suited to the purposes of fiction * Financial Times
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