A beautiful and atmospheric novel about family, love, loss and regret by critically acclaimed author Roma Tearne. How deep the summer had bitten into the land that last August, how cruelly it had burnt into earth and grass and air. What had started out as a pastel and water-faded spring turning so unexpectedly into a splintering, shimmering thing. All that had been required was a spark to cause a fire. Why had no one noticed? The summer of 1939 broke the Maudsley family. Cecily was only thirteen years-old and desperate to grow up; desperate to be as beautiful and desired and reckless as her older sister Rose. Now, in her forties, the family resemblance is uncanny but Cecily is a shadow of her former self. A part of her died that fateful summer. Returning to the deserted family farm as an adult, Cecily recalls the light before the storm, before the war came and before the terrible family tragedy. It was a summer of laughter and icecream, promises and first love. She remembers...

Opening dramatically with the horrors of the 2005 London bombings, this is the profoundly moving story of a country on the brink of civil war and a child's struggle to come to terms with loss. London. On a bright July morning a series of bombs bring the capital to a halt. Simon Swann, a medic from one of the large teaching hospitals, is searching frantically amongst the chaos and the rubble. All around police sirens and ambulances are screaming but Simon does not hear. He is out of breath because he has been running, and he is distraught. But who is he looking for? To find out we have first to go back thirty years to a small island in the Indian Ocean where a little girl named Alice Fonseka is learning to ride a bicycle on the beach. The island is Sri Lanka, with its community on the brink of civil war. Alice's life is about to change forever. Soon she will have to leave for England, abandoning her beloved grandfather, and accompanied by her mother Sita, a woman broken by a series...

â??The Swimmerâ?? is a gripping, captivating novel about love, loss and what home really means. Forty-three year old Ria is used to being alone. As a child, her life changed forever with the death of her beloved father and since then, she has struggled to find love.That is, until she discovers the swimmer. Ben is a young illegal immigrant from Sri Lanka who has arrived in Norfolk via Moscow. Awaiting a decision from the Home Office on his asylum application, he is discovered by Ria as he takes a daily swim in the river close to her house. He is twenty years her junior and theirs is an unconventional but deeply moving romance, defying both boundaries and cultures â?? and the xenophobic residents of Orford. That is, until tragedy occurs.

A lyrical and profoundly moving story of love, loss and civil war, set in Sri Lanka, London and Venice.When author Theo Samarajeeva returns to his native Sri Lanka after his wife’s death, he hopes to escape his gnawing loss amid the lush landscape of his increasingly war-torn country. But as he sinks into life in this beautiful, tortured land, he also finds himself slipping into friendship with an artistic young girl, Nulani, whose family is caught up in the growing turmoil. Soon friendship blossoms into love. Under the threat of civil war, their affair offers a glimmer of hope to a country on the brink of destruction…But all too soon, the violence which has cast an ominous shadow over their love story explodes, tearing them apart. Betrayed, imprisoned and tortured, Theo is gradually stripped of everything he once held dear – his writing, his humanity and, eventually, his love. Broken by the belief her lover is dead, Nulani flees Sri Lanka to a cold and lonely life of exile. As the years pass and the country descends into a morass of violence and hatred, the tragedy of Theo and Nulani's failed love spreads like a poison among friends sickened by the face of civil war, and the lovers must struggle to recover some of what they have lost and to resurrect, from the wreckage of their lives, a fragile belief in the possibility of redemption.Beautifully written, by turns heartbreaking and uplifting, `Mosquito’ is a first novel of remarkable and compelling power.From Publishers WeeklyIn Tearne's beautifully crafted debut, middle-aged novelist Theo Samarajeeva leaves London after the death of his wife and returns to his native Colombo, Sri Lanka, which has been ravaged by the continuing civil war between Tamil separatists and the Sinhalese majority government. In his many novels, Theo, who is Sinhalese, empathizes with the Tamil cause, but he refuses to take any extra precautions for his own safety on returning, despite the danger his books bring. After teenage artist Nulani Mendis, whose father was burnt alive by separatists, continually appears in his garden, where she draws in solitude, Theo commissions her to paint his portrait. As Theo and Nulani's lives become increasingly intertwined, genuine romance begins to unfold, but dangers lurk: a menacing former Tamil child solider, Vikram, has taken a liking to Nulani; meanwhile, Nulani's venomous uncle soon learns of the relationship with Theo. Tearne captures the desperation, fear and hope of love during wartime, showing multiple sides of the human capacity for survival. (July) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From BooklistAfter a self-imposed exile in London, writer Theo Samarajeeva returns to his homeland of Sri Lanka, which is on the brink of a violent uprising. Determined to write and to grieve over the death of his murdered wife, Theo is surprised by the friendship and blossoming love between himself and a young Sri Lankan artist, Nulani Mendis. Just as the two begin to create a life together, the encroaching civil war shatters their plans, casting them adrift and changing their lives forever. Tearne’s painterly approach to narrative renders visible the memory of love, the sensations of hope, and the heart-wrenching brutality of a war-torn nation. Mosquito depicts the Sri Lankan landscape just as beautifully as it explores its characters’ emotional pain and sense of longing. Like García Márquez in Love in the Time of Cholera, Tearne addresses questions of enduring love and the power of memory, guiding the reader into times of hopelessness but clinging to the traces of love that buoy the characters through unimaginable trials and sorrow. --Heather Paulson

Grace de Silva, a mother of five, struggles to hold her family and her crumbling marriage together as civil unrest stirs in Sri Lanka. Her husband is charming but shiftless, and her children are poised to pursue their dreams for the future. Jacob, her eldest, wants to leave home for England, while Frieda longs to remain in her homeland. Thornton, Grace's favourite son, dreams of becoming a poet; his sister Alicia wants to be a concert pianist. But when Grace's youngest son, Christopher, becomes embroiled in the political tensions tearing apart the country, this once happy family is suddenly fractured. As four of the siblings make their way to London, they become caught in a cultural clash between East and West, and life as they've known it changes forever.