The Match [Hardcover]

Romesh Gunesekera (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 2008

The Booker Prize-nominated author's brilliant new novel about growing up, growing apart, and finding one's place in the world.

As a teenager from Sri Lanka, Sunny is living the typical life of an expatriate in 1970s Manila—a privileged, carefree existence—until one day when the secret behind his mother's tragic death years earlier is accidentally revealed to him, turning Sunny's world upside down. His life takes a series of unexpected turns—first in England, where he falls in love with the luminous Clara, and later in Sri Lanka, where he returns during a brief lull in the country's brutal ethnic war.

Reminiscent of V. S. Naipaul in his nuanced treatment of the melancholy of exile, Gunesekera takes the reader on an utterly absorbing journey across the late twentieth-century, postcolonial world. Spanning three continents and thirty years, The Match is a "beautiful and atmospheric" (Irish Times) exploration of the nature of loss and displacement, the search for identity and love, and the possibility, in the end, of redemption and renewal.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A Sri Lankan man mired in nostalgia pursues elusive passions in this fourth, bittersweet novel from award-winning Gunesekera (Heaven's Edge). Sunny Fernando, naïve and given to elaborate fantasies, arrives at the turning point in his adolescence when a cricket match brings him into close contact with fellow Sri Lankan Tina Navratanam. Sunny suffers painful disillusionment when he thinks that he has lost Tina to a friend, which leads in turn to a discovery about his mother's death. Throughout the novel, Gunesekara offers up rich characters, including Sunny's father's best friend Hector, an amiable, patient man who acts as a fairy godfather to Sunny. Delightfully cadenced dialogue reflects both the era and place, especially once Sunny leaves Manila behind for college in England. Once there he repeats the pattern of abandoning reality for visions of the past. As he moves through the seminal moments of his life-falling in love, having a child, reuniting with friends and finally visiting the country of his birth-he struggles with a sense of "existing in a special world of his own making." Gunesekara regards his characters with affectionate indulgence as he paints the evolution of intertwined lives, with the hopeful suggestion that even seemingly ingrained character flaws can be overcome.
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From The New Yorker

Beginning and ending with cricket matches, Gunesekera’s fourth novel might seem to bear the hallmarks of familiar post-colonial fare, but its preoccupations are revelatory and unique. Sunny Fernando, uprooted from Colombo as a child by his father’s hope for a freer life, spends his adolescence in Manila before settling in London, where, far from friends and family, he struggles to achieve a sense of belonging. Sunny’s memories assume such a potent reality that the world around him—slowed and hastened, respectively, by drink and by a family of his own—sometimes seems to him a kind of solipsistic dream. His efforts to reëngage with his life are especially moving because they are presented as ordinary. Sunny’s search is not for cultural identity so much as for a basic understanding of what it means to connect.
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 308 pages
• Publisher: New Press, The (January 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1595581987
• ISBN-13: 978-1595581983
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 6.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,092,741 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