When Grace de Silva's once-prominent family loses their vast tea estate,
she has little idea how everyone's life in her lush, Eden-like homeland
of Sri Lanka is about to change. Her children dream of escape--Jacob,
the eldest, wants desperately to go to England; Thornton longs to become
a poet; Alicia wants to be a concert pianist. But civil unrest is
brewing and Christopher, the youngest of the de Silva children, is soon
caught up in the violence and tragedy that follows.
Against a backdrop of escalating ethnic conflict, Grace watches
helplessly as the life she knows begins to crumble. Slowly, this
once-inseparable family is torn apart as they make the decision to
emigrate to England.
In London, the de Silva's are all, in their different ways, desperately
homesick. Caught in a cultural clash between the traditional life they
knew in the East and the jarring modernity of the West, life is not what
any of them had dreamed of. Only Meeka, the first of the de Silva family
to be born in England, moves confidently through a world that is full of
possibilities. But even her life is not as easy as it often seems to her
immigrant family. Only after she has overcome heartbreak and a terrible
mistake can she finally see the extraordinary effects of history on her
family's migration.
This beautifully crafted story of hope and survival will appeal to all
readers of White Teeth and The Inheritance of Loss.
