Cinnamon Gardens by Shyam Selvadurai5/24/2023 ![]() ![]() Not least of the novel's virtues is the way he seems to conjure up a whole social panorama. Annalukshmi's Jane Austen-ish domestic life - anxious mother, bossy aunt, catty sisters, endless talk of prospective husbands - is brought to life with glancing humour. The characters and setting are established in a measured, finely judged manner, allowing us to feel at home with them. this is, in many ways, an old-fashioned novel, brimming with old-fashioned virtues. In a parallel narrative, her uncle, Balendran Navaratnam, respectably married but secretly homosexual, has his life disrupted by the arrival in Ceylon of Richard, a lover from long ago. ![]() Among them is Annalukshmi, an independent and high-spirited young teacher intent on thwarting her parents' plans to arrange her marriage. In Shyam Selvadurai's masterful second novel, set in repressive and complex 1920s Ceylon, the Cinnamon Gardens is a residential enclave of wealthy Ceylonese. Selvadurai has captured horrifyingly well the airlessness of a society in which only a few are truly able to breathe, and deeply' Mary Loudon, The Times ![]()
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