After more than 20 years living far from his homeland and “protected from the past”, Triton, the narrator, has a chance encounter with a fellow Sri Lankan that brings back a wave of memories of “a bay-fronted house 6,000 miles away”. What follows is an extended recollection of Triton’s youth, beginning in Sri Lanka in 1962, when he was 11 years old and started working for Mr Salgado, a wealthy marine biologist. Life in Salgado’s house is ordered and insular, but outside disturbances gradually encroach on their lives, until the changes spreading across Sri Lanka can no longer be ignored. While using the familiar narrative trope of a servant observing a way of life in decline, Romesh Gunesekera’s Booker-shortlisted first novel, now reissued in this 20th-anniversary edition, remains an astute evocation of Sri Lanka as it approached a time of upheaval.
