Bringing Tony Home

(Paperback)

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"Bringing Tony Home" is a breakthrough collection, including a novella and three short stories that together portray a young boy's childhood and coming of age in 1940s and 1950s Sri Lanka. The title story follows a young boy whose family has recently suffered economic hardships and has just moved out of their home several miles away to a much smaller house, leaving the boy's beloved dog, Tony, behind. But the boy, devoted to his dog, returns to his old home on his own to find Tony and take him by foot to the family's new home. The story recounts the boy's near-tragic journey, and follows him as he observes the changes in his family as they adjust to their new surroundings.In "Elsewhere: Something Like a Love Story", a boy finds forbidden love with a schoolmate scorned by other students for her poverty and sexual proclivity. The love is short-lived, as a schoolmate, purporting to be the girl's boyfriend, threatens him. The story fast-forwards 15 years when the couple meets by chance in the city. "Elsewhere" touches on the bittersweet memories the two share, and follows the tragic story of the woman who, in the end, loses everything she has ever had because of her status as a woman in her community."Poor Young Man: A Requiem" find the boy as a young man, just turning 21, recounting his relationship with his father during the years their family's fortunes were disappearing. And in perhaps the collection's most moving and stylistically complex story, "Hark, The Moaning Pond: A Grandmother's Tale", told through the boy's eyes as a much older man, follows the young boy coming to terms with his grandmother's death, and connecting his grandmother to the deeper story and mythology of their homeland.

Reviews

What is wonderful is the way Abeysekara can make a whole era hang on a single strand of memory.
Michael Ondaatje, Booker Prize winning author of The English Patient

"These multilayered stories, worth repeat reading, make a welcome introduction to Abeysekara and his homeland."
Publishers Weekly

Impressions of youthpainful lessons learned, emotions intensely experienced and adulthood broachedare reconsidered from the perspective of maturity in these long, sensuously detailed fictions. A sophisticated jigsaw of a book, sensitivelymixing memory and history with regret and rites of passage.
Kirkus Reviews

"Bringing Tony Home is a collection of short stories from Tissa Abeysekara, who provokes the strange coincidences of life...highly recommended reading for fans of short fiction."
The Midwest Book Review

Author Bio

Tissa Abeysekara was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka, in 1939. He began writing fiction in his native Sinhala the late 1950's, but for the next thirty years devoted his professional life to film and television, becoming one of the country's most respected screenwriters and directors. In 1997, at the age fifty-eight, he published the novella Bringing Tony Home, which went on to win Sri Lanka's esteemed Gratiaen Prize, an annual award for the best novel in English given by a trust established by Michael Ondaatje. In addition to many screenplays for television and film, Abeysekara is the author of the novel, In My Kingdom of the Sun and the Holy Peak, Pitagamkarayo (The Outsiders), and the collection of short short essays, Roots, Reflections and Reminiscences. He is currently the Director of the Television Training Institute of Sri Lanka.