Kirjahaku

*NEW YORK TIMES, BOOK REVIEW EDITOR'S CHOICE**NOMINATED FOR THE DUBLIN LITERARY PRIZE*Randy Boyagoda's Beggar's Feast is a tour de force of a novel set in Sri Lanka about a man living in defiance of fate. 'Gleaming . . . An ambitious book that seeks to convey the sweep of history through the prism of one island' Sara Wheeler, New York Times Sam Kandy, born in a poor village and abandoned by his family ten years later at a remote temple, resolves to make his own luck amongst the cheats and chancers of the world.He returns to his birth village as a steely self-made man. He marries a nobleman's daughter and coldly pursues a life of wealth, prestige, and power.And so begins a devastating chain of events...Beggar's Feast is a masterpiece - a raw, profound and magnificent novel about origins and endings, about what we forsake to survive.'Ambitious . . . a narrative that spans the whole of the last century', Financial Times 'A brilliant book. This novel reminds us of the values we are taught as children but which we might forget as we enter adulthood' Nadeem Aslam, author of The Blind Man's GardenRandy Boyagoda's first novel, Governor of the Northern Province, was nominated for the ScotiaBank Giller Prize in 2006. He has written for a variety of publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Paris Review, and Harper's Magazine. He lives in Toronto with his wife and four daughters.

'As moving as it is hysterically funny' Gary Shteyngart, author of Vera, or Faith 'Tender, eviscerating, perfect' Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao Devi, a Sri Lankan village girl dreams of going to Harvard University. Thousands of miles and tens of thousands of dollars to the west, Katrina, a middle-class American girl, steps onto the green-lawned quadrangle of an elite college for the best education money can buy. To pay for Devi's application fees, Devi's father works two shifts cleaning toilets at a five-star hotel in Colombo. Meanwhile, Katrina's professor dad commits himself to years of double teaching overload at his middling technical university to pay for her world-class tuition. Set between contemporary Sri Lanka and the United States, this is a moving, funny and sharply observed story of how the rich and poor get an education, and of dreams on a collision course with corruption and hypocrisy as the characters pursue family and personal goals, none of which is an education for its own sake. Full of warmth, comedic reversals and richly drawn characters, this is a sweeping family story which asks: what is an education for? And what are the costs - both financial and moral - to achieve it?

Salman Rushdie once observed that William Faulkner was the writer most frequently cited by third world authors as their major influence. Inspired by the unexpected lines of influence and sympathy that Rushdie’s statement implied, this book seeks to understand connections between American and global experience as discernible in twentieth-century fiction. The worldwide imprint of modern American experience has, of late, invited reappraisals of canonical writers and classic national themes from globalist perspectives. Advancing this line of critical inquiry, this book argues that the work of Salman Rushdie, Ralph Ellison, and William Faulkner reveals a century-long transformation of how American identity and experience have been imagined, and that these transformations have been provoked by new forms of immigration and by unanticipated mixings of cultures and ethnic groups. This book makes two innovations: first, it places a contemporary world writer’s fiction in an American context; second, it places two modern American writers’ novels in a world context. Works discussed include Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet and Satanic Verses; Ellison’s Invisible Man and Juneteenth; and Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Light in August. The scholarly materials range from U.S. immigration history and critical race theory to contemporary studies of cultural and economic globalization.

Salman Rushdie once observed that William Faulkner was the writer most frequently cited by third world authors as their major influence. Inspired by the unexpected lines of influence and sympathy that Rushdie’s statement implied, this book seeks to understand connections between American and global experience as discernible in twentieth-century fiction. The worldwide imprint of modern American experience has, of late, invited reappraisals of canonical writers and classic national themes from globalist perspectives. Advancing this line of critical inquiry, this book argues that the work of Salman Rushdie, Ralph Ellison, and William Faulkner reveals a century-long transformation of how American identity and experience have been imagined, and that these transformations have been provoked by new forms of immigration and by unanticipated mixings of cultures and ethnic groups. This book makes two innovations: first, it places a contemporary world writer’s fiction in an American context; second, it places two modern American writers’ novels in a world context. Works discussed include Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet and Satanic Verses; Ellison’s Invisible Man and Juneteenth; and Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Light in August. The scholarly materials range from U.S. immigration history and critical race theory to contemporary studies of cultural and economic globalization.

A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITOR'S CHOICE A GLOBE AND MAIL BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR Eight months before he became a suicide bomber, Prin went to the zoo with his family. Following a cancer diagnosis, forty-year old Prin vows to become a better man and a better Catholic. He’s going to spend more time with his kids and better time with his wife, care for his recently divorced and aging parents, and also expand his cutting-edge research into the symbolism of the seahorse in Canadian literature. But when his historic college in downtown Toronto faces a shutdown and he meets with the condominium developers ready to take it over—including a foul-mouthed young Chinese entrepreneur and Wende, his sexy ex-girlfriend from graduate school—Prin hears the voice of God. Bewildered and divinely inspired, he goes to the Middle East, hoping to save both his college and his soul. Wende is coming, too. The first book in a planned trilogy, Original Prin is an entertaining and essential novel about family life, faith, temptation, and fanaticism. It’s a timely story about timeless truths, told with wise insight and great humour, confirming Randy Boyagoda’s place as one of Canada’s funniest and most provocative writers.