The Prisoner of Paradise

Description

Lucy Gladwell arrives in Mauritius from England to live with her aunt and uncle at their grand plantation house. Under the surface of this beautiful island paradise, poised between India and Africa, there is unease, and Lucy cannot help but feel discomfited by the restrictions she sees around her, and by the strangely attractive Don Lambodar, a young translator from Ceylon. It is 1825: the age of slavery is coming to its messy end, and word is lapping against the shores of the island of a charismatic new Indian leader who will shine the light of liberty. For Lucy, for Don, for everyone on the island, a devastating storm is coming...

Romesh Gunesekera is the author of four novels: Reef, which was shortlisted for both the Booker Prize and the Guardian Fiction Prize, The Sandglass, winner of the inaugural BBC Asia Award, Heaven's Edge, shortlisted for a Commonwealth Writers Prize and a New York Times Notable Book, and The Match. He has also written two collections of short stories: his acclaimed debut Monkfish Moon and a bilingual limited edition book O Colleccionador de Especiarias. He grew up in Sri Lanka and the Philippines and now lives in North London. He first visited Mauritius in 1998 where he discovered the beginnings of this novel. @RomeshG

Gunesekera's lush descriptions make you see and smell the island and feel its hot, damp air on your skin * Spectator * A terrific read: pacy, political, moral, atmospheric and yes, definitely romantic ...The film is waiting to be made. It's all there: an inverted but murky Pride and Prejudice, paradise spoilt, ill-fated lovers, rascals, imperial wickedness, the cunning of natives, plots and melees and a host of fabulous flowers ... Exquisite prose awakens all the senses -- Yasmin Alibhai-Brown * Independent * Gunesekera is strikingly adept at delineating the landscape of rootlessness ... [He] has a gentle, generous, deceptively light touch * Sunday Times * Gunesekera's mellifluous prose alone is worth the price of admission. His description here of a first kiss has surely never been bettered * Daily Mail * Gunesekera's storytelling is languorous, atmospheric, imagistic * Guardian * Seriously and movingly, The Prisoner of Paradise contains a very modern message: a plea for the book. It has as much to say about writing as it has about love and colonial misery ... Here are the genuine answers, colourful, arresting, fresh and enormous as any opera -- Todd McEwan * Glasgow Herald * In this blisteringly lucid novel, it's as if Jane Austen, John Keats, Charles Dickens and even William Burroughs have clubbed together to render a masterful double-take on the 19th century's own ideas of romance and empire, rendered in a colossally skilful, flexible hybrid of the best of English prose and prosody * Herald Scotland *