In 17 linked stories, Roshi Fernando's Homesick explores the dynamic of family, the meaning of home, the wrench of displacement.
It all begins with the title story, at a 1982 New Year's Eve party at the London home of Sri Lankans Victor and Nandini. From there, the stories move back and forth in time and place, from Sri Lanka to London to Sri Lanka, from the 1970s to the present. We follow the lives of Victor and Nandini's children, especially Preethi, their funny and forward daughter, and other friends and relatives on the periphery.
Preethi is a young girl eager to assimilate, pilfer wine, learn to smoke, try to suss out just how much sex is enough to make her popular but not promiscuous. Then Preethi witnesses something she shouldn't have seen, and tells the wrong person--with near-tragic consequences.
In a particularly poignant story, "Nil's Wedding," the young bride is sari-clad, led around by her father, toasted, fed sweets like a caged animal and, through it all, wonders at what she is giving up. She is caught between two worlds: one of her birth and one of her choosing. Does she love this man enough to abandon her life for him? Is there a way out?
The final story, "The Funeral," has a coincidence in it too far-fetched to take in, but that is the only false step in Fernando's interweaving series of stories of lives and longing, trials and failures, hope and despair. --Valerie Ryan, Cannon Beach Book Company, Ore.