Shehan Karunatilaka is a Sri Lankan writer.
Chinaman is his first book which won the Commonwealth Book Prize, the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, and the Gratiaen Prize, and was shortlisted for the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize.
Retired sportswriter W.G. Karunasena is dying. He will spend his final months drinking arrack, upsetting his wife, ignoring his son, and tracking down Pradeep S. Mathew, an elusive spin bowler he considers 'the greatest cricketer to walk the earth'.
On his quest to find this unsung genius, W.G. uncovers a coach with six fingers, a secret bunker below a famous stadium, an LTTE warlord, and startling truths about Sri Lanka, cricket and himself.
Ambitious, playful and strikingly original, Chinaman is a novel about cricket and Sri Lanka and of Sri Lanka through its cricket. Hailed by the Gratiaen Prize judges as 'one of the most imaginative works of contemporary Sri Lankan fiction', it is an astounding book.
Captures Sri Lanka's enduring cricket love affairA crazy, ambidextrous delightAs close to a masterpiece as anything to have come out of South Asia in recent yearsA brilliant debut lays bare Sri Lanka;s soul through a made-up sporting hero . . . incredibly funnyAn accomplished debut with excellently drawn characters, cheeky dialogue, well-crafted atmosphere and emotive depthMatch-fixers terrorists, dodgy government officials and everything you need to know about cricket in Sri LankaCapacious novel, discursive, learned with snappy one-liners, plotted like a good thriller, and as compulsively readableAn important book
