Beggar's Feast
-
- £5.99
-
- £5.99
Publisher Description
*NEW YORK TIMES, BOOK REVIEW EDITOR'S CHOICE*
*NOMINATED FOR THE DUBLIN LITERARY PRIZE*
Randy Boyagoda's Beggar's Feast is a tour de force of a novel set in Sri Lanka about a man living in defiance of fate.
'Gleaming . . . An ambitious book that seeks to convey the sweep of history through the prism of one island' Sara Wheeler, New York Times
Sam Kandy, born in a poor village and abandoned by his family ten years later at a remote temple, resolves to make his own luck amongst the cheats and chancers of the world.
He returns to his birth village as a steely self-made man. He marries a nobleman's daughter and coldly pursues a life of wealth, prestige, and power.
And so begins a devastating chain of events
Beggar's Feast is a masterpiece - a raw, profound and magnificent novel about origins and endings, about what we forsake to survive.
'Ambitious . . . a narrative that spans the whole of the last century', Financial Times
'A brilliant book. This novel reminds us of the values we are taught as children but which we might forget as we enter adulthood' Nadeem Aslam, author of The Blind Man's Garden
Randy Boyagoda's first novel, Governor of the Northern Province, was nominated for the ScotiaBank Giller Prize in 2006. He has written for a variety of publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Paris Review, and Harper's Magazine. He lives in Toronto with his wife and four daughters.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Boyagoda's winding second novel (after Governor of the Northern Province) tells the story of a Sri Lankan village boy who spends his entire life remaking himself. A few years after his parents give him to a monastery, not long into the 20th century, the boy, 13, renames himself Sam Kandy and flees to the capital city of Colombo, where he begins his shady journey to success. Starting as an apprentice to a hustler, Sam uses his cunning to make a profit, and then boards a ship for Australia. From Colombo to Sydney to Singapore and back, Sam uses a combination of blackmail and sweet talk to make himself an underworld king not respected, but feared. He takes advantage of the desires of colonialists and the desperation of his own countrymen and, in 1930, becomes one of the first native Sri Lankans to own an automobile (something that was, at the time, illegal). By the end of Sam Kandy's century-long life, the only thing he has stayed true to, through multiple names, schemes, wives, and children, is his commitment to leaving the past behind. Told in prose as circuitous as Sam's life, this at-times affected novel reveals just how much can be laid to waste through one man's need to get ahead.
