The SandGlass

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Among the secrets that Prins Ducal's mother has taken with her to the grave is the mystery of his father's accidental death 40 years earlier. With the help of his friend Chip, his mother's ex-lodger and confidante, Prins sets out to uncover the truth.

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Library Journal Review

Expatriate Sri Lankan matriarch Pearl Ducal dies in London just days before her first great-grandchild is born in the same hospital. Her wandering son and only surviving child, Prins, descends upon his old home in Sri Lanka, agitated by the mystery of his dissolving family. The result is a tale replete with silences, deaths, and the imposing presence of the entrepreneurial, predatory Vatunas clan, whose grand homestead nearly encircled the eccentric dream home of Prins's late father, Jason. Narrator Chip, Prins's contemporary and a longtime confidante of Pearl's, is swept into the Ducal enigmas by virtue of association. Weaving memories of conversations with Pearl through two days of talks with Prins, Chip emerges with the melancholy story of tragic Jason, long-suffering Pearl, and their unraveling family. A tender, accomplished novel by Booker Prize finalist Gunesekera (Reef, LJ 2/1/95); highly recommended.‘Janet Ingraham Dwyer, Columbus, OH (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

Mysterious disappearances‘of individuals, families, nations and ways of life‘haunt this poignant tale of two feuding Sri Lankan families and their intertwined destinies, at home and in England, since the 1950s. Piecing together diaries and anecdotes, narrator Chip, a Sri Lankan expatriate in London, ruminates on the sorrowful story of his friends Pearl and Jason Ducal and their adult son, Prins, whose lives have been marred at every turn by the malign influences of their Colombo neighbors, the Vatunases, a dynasty of corporate robber-barons. Jason's 1956 death in an ostensible freak accident facilitates a business coup that cements the Vatunases' ascendancy. Now family matriarch Pearl has died, an event that opens the novel in present-day London. Deeply affected by this new tragedy, Chip reflects sadly on mortality, identity, exile and the passage of time. Although Booker finalist Gunesekera's (The Reef; Monkfish Moon) prose becomes a bit turgid in some of this reflection, he thoroughly involves the reader in the Ducals' plight and skillfully evokes their disparate worlds. (Oct.) FYI: Paperback rights to Riverhead. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Booklist Review

Gunesekera's novel of subtle tragedy and desperate intrigue, set against a backdrop of political upheaval, chronicles the interaction of two feuding families in post-colonial Sri Lanka. After the death of his mother, Pearl, Jason Ducal is driven to reexamine his family's history. In so doing, he comes to look more closely at the questionable circumstances surrounding his father's death and the part his potential wife's family may have played in it. Pearl and her tragic marriage are brilliantly depicted through anecdotes told to a family friend, and each member of Pearl's family eventually reflects the search for peace that she failed to complete. Jason struggles to understand his parents' relationship as a means of transcending the legacy of unhappiness that he seems to have inherited. Part murder mystery, part historical fiction, this touching drama reveals the tangle of human emotions and social obligations that bind people together as families and questions the nature of love--romantic love, filial love, the love of a friend. --Bonnie Johnston

Kirkus Book Review

A beautifully crafted second novel from Booker finalist and Sri LankanŽborn Gunesekera (Reef, 1995) tells of two warring families in contemporary Sri Lanka. Like the reluctant confession of a wayward spouse, the truth of the tale here is learned incrementally, teased out by inference and gradual revelation. Nor are there any stunning denouementsŽonly a pervasive sadness as two accomplished families, like Sri Lanka's two real-life warring factions, continue harming each other. The story of the feuding Ducal and Vatunas families is narrated by Chip, himself a Sri Lankan who immigrated in 1975 to London (where he lived in Pearl Ducal's apartment). A year after Pearl's death, Chip, in Sri Lanka on business, is anxious to catch up with PearlŽs son Prins, whom he suspects has gone into hiding for fear of his life. Cutting back first to the previous year, when Prins flew to London for his mother's funeral, Chip continues afterward moving back and forth through time and place as he tells what he learned or intuited of a story beginning back in the 1930s, when Pearl married Jason Ducal. Jason turned out to be an astute businessman, but when he bought his dream houseŽnext to the Vatunas family's compoundŽthe Ducal family's troubles began: Esra, the Vatunas patriarch, conspired to undercut a business venture of Jason's and was probably responsible for his murder in 1956; EsraŽs son Tivoli may have been Pearl's lover; and his grandson Dino seemed determined to block PrinsŽ marriage to Lola Vatunas, DinoŽs daughter, and tried to deter PrinsŽ efforts to discover who killed Jason. As Pearl hints in deathbed reminiscences and in letters found afterward, living near the Vatunas family permanently blighted the DucalsŽ lives. Elegiac in mood and rich in evocations of character and setting, a novel that gracefully limns the origins of a domesticŽand nationalŽtragedy.