Funny Boy

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Sham Selvadurai has brought back from his Sri Lankan childhood a glittering and wise novel. Funny Boy keeps repeating with quiet conviction that the human condition can, in spite of everything, be joyful. You are not alone, it says to the reader. ‘I understand you. I too was there. I remember.’ In the world of his large family, affluent Tamils living in Colombo, Arjie is an oddity Arjie is a ‘funny boy’ who prefers dressing as a girl to playing cricket with his older brother. In Funny Boy, we follow the life of the family through Arjie’s eyes as he struggles to come to terms both with his own homosexuality and with the racism of the society in which he lives. In the north of Sri Lanka there’s a war going on between the army and the Tamil Tigers, and gradually it begins to encroach on the family’s comfortable life. Sporadic acts of violence flare into full-scale riots and lead ultimately to tragedy. Written in clear, simple prose, and masterly in its mingling of the personal and the political, Funny Boy marks the arrival of an exceptional new novelist, a writer with profound understanding of the human heart.