Cinnamon Gardens (48 page)

Other books were extremely helpful: K. M. De Silva’s
A History of Sri Lanka
; S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike’s
The Handbook of the Ceylon National Congress 1919-1928
; H. W. Cave’s
The Book of Ceylon
; M. D. Raghavan’s
Tamil Culture in Ceylon
; S. Namasivayam’s
The Legislatures of Ceylon
; Rajakrishnan’s
The Tamils of Sri Lankan Origin in the History of West Malaysia
, and Jeffrey Weeks’
Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain from the Nineteenth Century to the Present
. The
Daily News
from 1927 and 1928 was an excellent source for period details, accounts of labour strikes and the Donoughmore hearings.

The photograph of a street in Cinnamon Gardens, which appears on the jacket of this book, is from H. W. Cave’s
The Book of Ceylon
and was kindly re-photographed for me by Dominic Sansoni. The two people on the jacket are, of course, real, and I am very grateful to their families for letting me use these photographs. The lives of these two people, however, in no way bear any resemblance to the lives of the characters in this book.

Shyam Selvadurai was born in 1965 in Colombo, Sri Lanka. He came to Canada with his family at the age of nineteen. He has studied creative writing and theatre, and has a B.F.A. from York University.

His first novel,
Funny Boy
(1994), was a national bestseller, winner of the W.H. Smith/Books in Canada First Novel Award and The Lambda Literary Award in the U.S., and was named a Notable Book by the American Library Association.
Cinnamon Gardens
(1998), his second novel, was shortlisted for the Trillium Award. It has been published in the U.S., the U.K., India, and numerous countries in Europe. He is also the editor of
Story-Wallah! A Celebration of South Asian Fiction
(2004).

Shyam Selvadurai lives in Toronto, where he is at work on his next novel.