Funny Boy

Arjie is a Tamil boy growing up in Colombo in the 1970s and early 80s, discovering his homosexuality as Sri Lanka's ethnic tensions between Tamils and Sinhalese are building toward the catastrophic anti-Tamil pogrom of 1983. Selvadurai weaves coming-of-age and coming-out into a dispatch about what it means to be doubly othered — by sexuality in a homophobic culture and by ethnicity in a country moving toward civil war. The most important Sri Lankan novel in English and the one that holds two kinds of crisis simultaneously without letting either simplify the other.