Mirage - Hardcover

Chandraratna, Bandula

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1574231960 ISBN 13: 9781574231960

Publisher: Black Sparrow Press, 2004

Synopsis

There is a simplicity to Mirage, this story of star-crossed lovers whose brief happiness is cut short, that belies the skill of its telling. Set in a closed Arab kingdom in our own time, it has the timeless appeal and delicacy of a fairy tale, yet also the moral weight and all the human sadness of a novel by Thomas Hardy. It tells how Sayeed, a good but unexceptional Muslim, finds happiness with Latifa, a girl who might have been beyond his reach had widowhood and misfortune not brought her within it. The scene for Sayeed's marriage is set with unpretending tenderness and in unerring detail: the city hospital where he works, the shanty town where he lives, his brother's desert home, the peasant wedding, the struggle to make a decent life for his new wife and her child. Heat, dirt, and squalor form the backdrop of a tragedy, one fueled by petty jealousy, sexual desire, and religious fervor, with Latifa, a village girl unused to the ways of the city: its ultimate victim.

Mirage was published in England in 1999 at the author's own expense. It emerged from that year's Booker Prize deliberations the unexpected favorite of a number of the judges, just missing the final shortlist. Boyd Tonkin, literary editor of the London Independent, chose it as his Book of the Year, saying "we need novels as lucid, moving, and compassionate as this one."

About this title

About the Author

Bandula Chandraratna has worked in hospitals in Saudi Arabia and the UK and p

From Booklist

A purely told tale of humble lives, Chandraratna's first novel is as spellbinding as it is devastating. Orphaned as a boy, Sayeed has sacrificed his own happiness to care for his younger brother, leaving him and his growing family their parents' home and land in a verdant village in an unnamed Muslim country to move to the city, where he lives precariously in a dusty shantytown and works as a hospital porter. On a visit home, he surprises himself by agreeing to his brother's plan for him to marry a young widow, hoping fervently that she and her little daughter won't find city life too odious. Fablelike in its clarity and careful pacing, lushly beautiful and exquisitely touching in its lingering descriptions, Chandraratna's quietly powerful and tragic tale slowly and inexorably reveals the malevolence brewing beneath the surface of this spare but volatile world as traditional ways of life break down and jealousy, resentment, and vindictive religious extremism intensify. Self-published in England, Chandraratna's tale just missed being short-listed for the Booker Prize. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About this edition

• Publisher: Black Sparrow Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1574231960
• ISBN 13: 9781574231960
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 214