Funny Boy
by Shyam Selvadurai
A Tamil boy comes of age as Sri Lanka comes apart.
For you if
you want to understand Sri Lanka's civil war through a boy who is also navigating his own identity in a family that can't see either clearly
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Arjie is a Tamil boy growing up in Colombo in the 1970s and early 80s, discovering his homosexuality as Sri Lanka's ethnic tensions between Tamils and Sinhalese are building toward the catastrophic anti-Tamil pogrom of 1983. Selvadurai weaves coming-of-age and coming-out into a dispatch about what it means to be doubly othered — by sexuality in a homophobic culture and by ethnicity in a country moving toward civil war. The most important Sri Lankan novel in English and the one that holds two kinds of crisis simultaneously without letting either simplify the other.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- Sri Lanka • South Asia
- Voice
- Written by a Sri Lankan author
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