Romesh Gunesekera
Heaven's Edge
'Sometimes we have to choose between people and places, the sky and the earth. War and peace ...'
Marc, in search of a dream, leaves London and sets out for the island where his grandfather was born and where his father's plane was shot down in flames. It is an island once said to have been near the edge of heaven, but now ravaged and despoiled by war.There by a glittering lake he sees the subversive Uva, an eco-warrior intent on releasing a pair of captive emerald doves. Finding her launches him into a world of difficult choices but their passionate affair is cut short when she disappears. Desperate to find her, Marc embarks on a final terrifying journey that will test all his beliefs as he confronts brutal violence in a quest for love.
Booker-shortlisted Romesh Gunesekera's third novel is a modern odyssey: a gripping adventure and a moving love story beautifully written with clarity, subtlety and terrific emotional force. A truly magnificent novel for our times.
First paragraph...
I arrived on this island, by boat, the night of the fullest moon I had ever seen in my life. The sky was clear and the sea phosphorescent; the coastline, from a distance, looked entrancing. Two flying fish, accidentally netted, were released by the boatman as we docked at the pier of the Palm Beach Hotel. I thought that was auspicious.
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Reviews
'A gripping novel, written with an unforced poetic assurance' TLS
'Gunesekera can certainly write … beautiful' Literary Review
'Haunting dreamlike prose … about a dreamer, but it is also the story of an individual caught between two cultures and an unknown country referred to as home … Gunesekera is quite simply a very good, often inspiringly lyric writer who feels as deeply as he sees' Irish Times
'The writing here is powerful - dense, cadenced, the images perfectly observed' Daily Telegraph
'A luminous and hard-hitting novel … fascinating' Financial Times'An engaging adventure story set in an unusual landscape, exquisitely described … with heart-stopping action' Sunday Telegraph
'Lyrical and dreamlike … encompasses both history and myth' Independent
'A magnificently constructed and brilliantly executed novel' Scotland on Sunday
'Subtle, poetic and dreamlike … all the great binary themes of humanity - exile and homecoming, trust and betrayal and of course, love and hate - are here. Gunesekera's melancholy, almost elegiac use of language makes for engrossing reading' Waterstone's Book Quarterly
'Despoiled paradises and desecrated Edens have always been at the heart of Romesh Gunesekera's subtle and often elegiac fiction. Heaven's Edge, his most powerful and compelling novel to date, recreates the mythic fall in the Edenic garden … a landscape almost hallucinogenic in its abundance is matched by a lushness of language, with images of flying fish, blue plumbago shrub and wild aubergines, and the scent of citrus and citronella … Gunesekera has created a palpable, terrifying world that, for all the precariousness of its beauty, harbours love and hope' Guardian
