The novel centres around Shivan Rassiah, the beloved grandson, who is of mixed Tamil and Sinhalese lineage, and who also-to his grandmother’s dismay-grows from beautiful boy to striking gay man. In Shyam Selvadurai’s sweeping new novel, his first in more than a decade, he creates an unforgettable ghost, a powerful Sri Lankan matriarch whose wily ways, insatiable longing for land, houses, money and control, and tragic blindness to the human needs of those around her parallels the volatile political situation of her war-torn country.

It is the duty of the living relatives to free those doomed to this fate by doing kind deeds and creating good karma. In Buddhist myth, the dead may be reborn as “hungry ghosts”-spirits with stomach so large they can never be full-if they have desired too much during their lives. E Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)

Awards and Honoursġ995 Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award (formerly Smith Books/Books in Canada First Novel Award) (Winner)ġ996 Lambda Literary Award - Gay Men’s Fiction (Winner)ġ997 Stonewall Book Award–Literature (American Library Association (Finalist)ġ997 RUSA Notable Book (American Library Association) The result is a novel about discovery and leavetaking, while time and time again the true longings of the human heart come up against the way things are. Selvadurai subtly juxtaposes a boy’s passage to adolescence and maturity with the upheavals of growing political unrest. Set in Sri Lanka, it is a haunting novel, told in six beautifully rendered stories, about a boy growing up within an extended upper-middle-class Tamil family in Colombo, during the seven years leading up to the 1983 riots. E58 F8 1994 Publisher’s Synopsis (McClelland and Stewart, 1994)įunny Boy is the remarkable literary debut of Shyam Selvadurai. His new novel Mansion of the Moon, a historical novel about the Buddha’s wife, will be released by Knopf in 2022. Selvadurai wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation of Funny Boy along with Deepa Mehta who also directed the film. Selvadurai’s short story “The Demoness Kali” that was first published in the August 2006 issue of Toronto Life won the Gold Prize in the Fiction Category of the 30th National Magazine Awards. He resides in Toronto and Sri Lanka and remains active in the pursuit of social justice. His second novel Cinnamon Gardens is set in colonial Ceylon in the 1920s.

Selvadurai worked as a scriptwriter for television before focusing on writing short stories, novels, and essays. in theatre directing and playwriting from York University, and an MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia. Born in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Shyam Selvadurai moved to Toronto, Canada with his mixed Tamil/Sinhalese family following the race riots of 1983.

Boy overboard by Peter Wells