Bone China
The Age
Saturday March 22, 2008
Bone China
Roma Tearne HarperCollins, $27.99SRI LANKAN-BORN Roma Tearne trained as a painter, and her fiction benefits from the vividness of her visual imagination. Her debut novel, Mosquito, drew unsettling contrasts between the stunning natural beauty of her birthplace and the savagery of the Sri Lankan civil war. Bone China is a domestic saga that charts the emigration of a Tamil family to England. The de Silvas are forced to leave their estate during WWII, when the patriarch gambles away the family fortune. Grace de Silva moves without complaint to Colombo. Caught up in the ethnic violence that erupts in the ensuing decades, most of Grace's children head for London. But starting a new life there is not what they imagined, and even as fresh challenges await, their history continues to stalk them. Tearne is a sensuous writer, and here her sumptuous descriptive powers are matched by strong characterisation and a flair for domestic drama.
© 2008 The Age