Ashok Ferrey Knihy

Sanjay de Silva lives in Colombo, constrained by a controlling father after losing his English mother. When his father is diagnosed with cancer, the power dynamics shift, leading Sanjay to an unexpected opportunity: he can live in England due to his half-English heritage. He arrives in south London in 1980, amidst the vibrant Thatcher years, where he meets Janine, a fellow Sri Lankan with a notorious reputation in their community. Despite their age difference, he falls in love with her. Sanjay manages to purchase a dilapidated house in Brixton and, against the odds, converts it into two flats. However, the house harbors secrets, with unsettling voices at night. This narrative follows the journey of south London's first Asian builder, who, over eight years, develops and sells eighty-four flats, profiting just before the 1988 crash. At its core, the story explores grief and the unique ways individuals cope with family mysteries and loss. Sanjay learns that grief is a transformation of love, a fluid connection that shifts from one form to another, like ice melting into water.

Our Sri Lankan narrator visits his friend Joe in Italy, where Joe attends a special course—in higher (or, shall we say, lower) studies in women. Italians—much like Sri Lankans—live at home through marriage, death, and sometimes even beyond the pale. An accompanying string of fake fiancés and phoney engagements are the backdrop to this delightful collection of darkly humorous tales about Sri Lankans at home and abroad. Long years and many miles away, Colombo’s Father Cruz attempts to rescue a church from parishioners who like to put their donations where others can see them—on large plaques; on the coast, a retired Admiral escapes the tsunami on an antique Dutch cabinet; two childhood sweethearts, in time-honoured Sri Lankan tradition, are married off to strangers.Ashok Ferrey writes about Sri Lanka and its people, wherever they roam, with remarkable acuity. He writes of the West’s effect on Sri Lankans, of its ‘turning them into caricatures, unmistakably genuine but not at all the real thing’. In The Good Little Ceylonese Girl, his second collection of stories, he shows us the reality beyond those feeble sketches, in its full glory.

A wicked tale of the devil in all of us establishes Ferrey as one of the subcontinent’s wittiest voices. ‘I was born ugly. That’s what my mother always said.’ So begins the story of young Sonny Mahadewala who lives a dual life: between his adoptive England where he lives in eccentric union with a privileged American, and the mixed bliss of the Mahadewala Walauwa, the big house on the mountain belonging to his father’s family in Kandy – the ancient capital of Sri Lanka – where he has both cachet and awful memories. For Sonny’s mother, a wonderfully maleficent anti-heroine, is convinced that demons possess this awfully ugly son of hers. Demons and the devil himself are the playing field of this book, whether seated in the draughty chapels of Oxford or roaming the Kandyan countryside and through their clever interplay they speak of larger horrors with able grace. For who is utterly good or utterly evil—and who, indeed, is the devil?