Heaven's Edge [Hardcover]

Romesh Gunesekera (Author), Fomesh Gunesekera (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 2003

Romesh Gunesekera's dazzling first novel, Reef, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and The Guardian First Fiction Award. Now he delivers a spellbinding modern odyssey that The Daily Telegraph praises as "powerful-dense, cadenced, the images perfectly observed." In search of a dream, Marc leaves London for the land of his patrimony and family secrets -- an unnamed island (based on the author's native Sri Lanka) once said to be near the edge of heaven but now despoiled by war. There he falls in love with Uva, an eco-warrior whose covert farming has made her the target of deadly kidnappers. Marc searches for her among the mystical land's underground dens of iniquity and ghostly colonial mansions. As gun battles and foot races erupt, he must confront the question his ancestors handled in such different ways: Is violence ever a proper path to freedom? He will discover the answer only once he is reunited with Uva in a utopia that offers a happiness he would defend with his life.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Set on an environmentally devastated tropical island that resembles his native Sri Lanka, Gunesekera's new novel follows a Londoner named Marc, who comes to the island to find his father but instead gets caught up in a passionate affair with an ecological activist. When he arrives at the country's only hotel, the run-down Palm Beach Inn, Marc encounters a scarred landscape nothing like the idyllic pictures painted by his grandfather Eldon, a native who moved to London in his youth. Marc's attempts to find his father, who disappeared here when Marc was a child, come to naught, but his lover, Uva, opens new doors as she teaches Marc about her efforts to continue farming against the wishes of the island's repressive regime. Government troops begin tracking Uva, and soon soldiers attack and destroy Uva's farm. Marc is imprisoned in a government compound but manages to escape. Once he tracks down Uva's erotically preoccupied bisexual friend, Jaz, and a metalworker named Kris who has pivotal ties to Uva's past, the three embark on a quest to find Uva. The search has moments of both breathtaking suspense-e.g., the trio rebuilds a damaged plane to escape pursuing soldiers-and quiet introspection, as Marc reflects on his ambivalence toward this land. The novel's structure is a bit cliched, but there's a spark in Gunesekera's writing that gives his characters life; the affair between Marc and Una is especially rich and subtle. Gunesekera has explored these cultures and themes in his earlier books, notably Reef, which was shortlisted for the Booker, but the compelling romance makes this one of his best efforts.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

With his family gone and London holding nothing more for him, Marc is drawn to his ancestral homeland--an island reminiscent of the author's native Sri Lanka--where his grandfather was born and his father met and courted his mother and later died. But violence and repression have ravaged the once paradisiacal place, and Marc's visit is bleak until he meets Uva, who established an illegal farm after losing her parents and home in the conflict. With her he finds both happiness and danger; when her farm is attacked, he becomes an "unfortunate obstruction" to be tagged and impounded. Escaping during a riot, Marc takes flight with the erogenous Jaz and metalworker Kris on a search for Uva, ultimately having to face the lengths to which he will go to achieve love and safety. Booker Prize finalist Gunesekera writes lyrically and with feeling about a land like his own in this novel, which has elements of fable and magic realism and is particularly appropriate for literary collections. Michele Leber
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press (February 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 080211735X
• ISBN-13: 978-0802117359
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,206,336 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Romesh Gunesekera was born in Sri Lanka and lives in Britain. His first novel Reef was shortlisted for the 1994 Booker Prize.
He is also the author of The Sandglass,(winner of the inaugural BBC Asia Award) and Heaven's Edge which like his collection of stories, Monkfish Moon, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. His fourth novel The Match, published in 2006 was hailed as a "book that not only shows what fiction can do, it shows why fiction is written - and read." (Irish Times).
His fiction has been translated into many languages and he has run highly acclaimed writing workshops around the world. He has also been a judge for a number of prestigious literary prizes including the David Cohen British Literature Prize and the Caine Prize for African Writing.
Granta reissued his first three books in September 2011 and Bloomsbury will be publishing his new novel, The Prisoner of Paradise, in February 2012 in the UK.
For more information see www.facebook.com/Romesh.Gunesekera or www.romeshgunesekera.co.uk

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "There is no tomorrow without yesterday.", September 18, 2005

By 

Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
(COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 100 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Heaven's Edge (Paperback)

Heaven's Edge is unique--it is not a romance, not a war chronicle, not a religious allegory, not a plea for ecological responsibility, and not science fiction, though it contains elements of all these genre. Marc, a young college graduate from London, has returned to an unnamed island, much like the author's island of Sri Lanka, on a mission to connect with his father's memory. His father, a military pilot, left the family in England when Marc was a very young child and returned to the island where he died while on a mission. Marc's doting grandfather, who raised him, never understood what drove his son to return to the very island he himself had escaped.

The novel opens with Marc's arrival at the island by boat, and Gunesekera quickly establishes the mood and the themes of freedom and repression, and past and present, as the boatman, upon his arrival, releases two flying fish, accidentally netted during the trip. The island is under military control, and the hotel where Marc stays strictly limits his movements.

In an intensely romantic scene, Marc escapes the stultifying restrictions one day and meets Uva, a young woman who is trying to repopulate the forest with native birds and animals, all of which have disappeared during the long war. When Marc is suddenly rendered unconscious and Uva disappears from his life, the mood changes instantly from romance to surreality, as Marc finds himself in captivity, enduring a regimented life more akin to science fiction than the heights of romance. Mind-numbing violence, brutally perpetrated by the military to remove any question of free thought and independent activity in the population, is the only constant in the lives of the characters, as Gunesekera explores our need to remain connected to our pasts and the ways in which our futures are outgrowths of our pasts. The graphically described violence further sets into sharp relief themes of personal identity, the desire for beauty, and the need to protect and preserve the natural world.

Sometimes enigmatic and even a bit preachy, the novel is at once magical and nightmarish, full of myth and allegory at the same time that it offers haunting, cautionary tales about the past and the use of violence to change the present and affect the future. Echoes of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden, the fall of man, legends about peacocks and leopards, and episodes telling the importance of love and respect pervade the novel, giving it immense color and depth. Clearly a pacifist, Gunesekera says, "The art of killing cannot be our finest achievement...Nothing is inevitable." But Gunesekera does not believe in being completely passive or non-violent when faced with true threats to life. "Sometimes you have to sacrifice your innocence to protect this world," he says. In this memorable novel with its stunning depictions of nature, especially birds and butterflies as they try to survive the depredations of man, he makes a powerful, ecological and political statement, presenting characters who try to create gardens of their own out of the decimated gardens of their pasts. Mary Whipple

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "There is no tomorrow without yesterday.", March 25, 2003

By 

Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
(COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 100 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Heaven's Edge (Hardcover)

Heaven's Edge is unique--it is not a romance, not a war chronicle, not a religious allegory, not a plea for ecological responsibility, and not science fiction, though it contains elements of all these genre. Marc, a young college graduate from London, has returned to an unnamed island, much like the author's island of Sri Lanka, on a mission to connect with his father's memory. His father, a military pilot, left the family in England when Marc was a very young child and returned to the island where he died while on a mission. Marc's doting grandfather, who raised him, never understood what drove his son to return to the very island he himself had escaped.

The novel opens with Marc's arrival at the island by boat, and Gunesekera quickly establishes the mood and the themes of freedom and repression, and past and present, as the boatman, upon his arrival, releases two flying fish, accidentally netted during the trip. The island is under military control, and the hotel where Marc stays strictly limits his movements.

In an intensely romantic scene, Marc escapes the stultifying restrictions one day and meets Uva, a young woman who is trying to repopulate the forest with native birds and animals, all of which have disappeared during the long war. When Marc is suddenly rendered unconscious and Uva disappears from his life, the mood changes instantly from romance to surreality, as Marc finds himself in captivity, enduring a regimented life more akin to science fiction than the heights of romance. Mind-numbing violence, brutally perpetrated by the military to remove any question of free thought and independent activity in the population, is the only constant in the lives of the characters, as Gunesekera explores our need to remain connected to our pasts and the ways in which our futures are outgrowths of our pasts. The graphically described violence further sets into sharp relief themes of personal identity, the desire for beauty, and the need to protect and preserve the natural world.

Sometimes enigmatic and even a bit preachy, the novel is at once magical and nightmarish, full of myth and allegory at the same time that it offers haunting, cautionary tales about the past and the use of violence to change the present and affect the future. Echoes of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden, the fall of man, legends about peacocks and leopards, and episodes telling the importance of love and respect pervade the novel, giving it immense color and depth as Marc tries to connect with the past. Clearly a pacifist, Gunesekera says, "The art of killing cannot be our finest achievement...Nothing is inevitable." But Gunesekera does not believe in being completely passive or non-violent when faced with true threats to life. "Sometimes you have to sacrifice your innocence to protect this world," he says. In this memorable novel with its stunning depictions of nature, especially birds and butterflies as they try to survive the depredations of man, he makes a powerful, ecological and political statement, presenting characters who try to create gardens of their own out of the decimated gardens of their pasts. Mary Whipple

1 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Don't waste your time, June 17, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Heaven's Edge (Hardcover)

The book starts well( first 20 pages). However, the writing switches from overloaded sentences, to very basic prose all over the place. The author leaves you wondering why the relationship betwen Marc and Uva is so strong.Why does Marc go in search for her. Would not a foreigner taht has been attacked leave the country? And then magicaly Uva appears in the last chapter out of nowhere.

Do not waste your time reading this novel.