Beggar's Feast

(Paperback)

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Description

A tour de force of a novel set in Sri Lanka about a man living in defiance of fate Sam Kandy, born in 1899 in a poor village in the heart of Ceylon, resolves to make his own luck amongst the cheats and chancers of the world. When twenty years reckoning with the streets of Colombo, the docks of Sydney and the brothels of Singapore lead Sam back to Ceylon, he coldly pursues a life of wealth, prestige, and power. Families are torn apart, fortunes are made and lost, and old ways collide with modernity's new machines and money and desires. Ambition, reinvention, tradition and family each demand an answer- what does it cost a man to rewrite his history

Reviews

A brilliant book -- Nadeem Aslam
A satirical feast * The Globe and Mail *
Ambitious . . . a narrative that spans the whole of the last century * Financial Times *
The story of a Ceylonese Odysseus . . . gleaming, ambitious * New York Times *
Beggar's Feast tackles the grand questions of the 20th century - reinvention, power, sacrifice - but what lies at the heart of this sweeping novel is a more intimate concern: how to find peace in an unforgiving world. In Sam Kandy, Randy Boyagoda has created a truly memorable character -- Tash Aw

Author Bio

Randy Boyagoda has written for a variety of publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Paris Review and Harper's Magazine. His second novel, Beggar's Feast, was nominated for the 2013 IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize and was selected as a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice. Born to Sri Lankan parents, he lives in Toronto with his wife and four daughters.