Happy Global Pride Month, a month that brings together the LGBTQIAP+ community & their allies around the world to celebrate diversity & equality.
I’m really pleased by the book the club voted in for June as it’s just perfect. It’s a country we haven’t read yet, it provides a great deal of cultural detail, & the book is a Lambda Literary Award Winner. (The Lambda Literary Awards recognize the best LGBTQIAP+ books published in a given year across dozens of categories. For this global book to be included in this US-based award is fabulous!)
Of course, a new country means I must include a cookbook for this land’s cuisine. Despite my global cookbook library, I didn’t have any cookbook for this country though I have eaten at restaurants which feature this food & can attest to its incredible flavor. I was happy to find a cookbook tonight written by a couple native to this land who come from different backgrounds—backgrounds which have such power disputes & cultural divisions they resulted in the country’s decades-long civil war which is written about in our winning book. The fact that this couple fell in love & then wrote a cookbook focusing on the “mosaic of diversity” in their country is just beautiful to me. This cookbook also provides a wonderful symmetry to the book we’ll be reading.
Prakash K Sivanathan was born a Tamil in the Jaffna peninsula in the north of Sri Lanka. His wife, Niranjala M Ellawala, is a Sinhalese from the hill country in the south. (If you’re unfamiliar with the brutal Tamil-Sinhalese conflict & why this couple’s pairing is so surprising, this article summarizes the Sri Lankan Civil War & the current state of the country.)
Moving to London, they opened up a multi award-winning Sri Lankan restaurant. Since retiring from the restaurant, they continue to share their knowledge in their cookery school.
As noted by reviewers, this cookbook is the definitive collection of Sri Lanka’s most authentic & vibrant recipes—100 delicious-looking recipes in all. Beautiful photography is also showcased celebrating the island’s food, history, culture, & people. Looking through the flavorful recipes, the cookbook seems perfect no matter your skill level as both basic & more complex recipes from all regions of the island are included. Measurements are also in both metric & imperial.
I can’t wait to cook these mouth-watering dishes!
but what book are we reading?
An evocative coming-of-age novel about growing up gay in Sri Lanka during the Tamil-Sinhalese conflict—one of the country’s most turbulent and deadly periods.
Arjie is “funny.”
The second son of a privileged family, he prefers staging make-believe wedding pageants with his female cousins to battling balls with the other boys. When his parents discover his innocent pastime, Arjie is forced to abandon his idyllic childhood games and adopt the rigid rules of an adult world. Bewildered by his incipient sexual awakening, mortified by the bloody Tamil-Sinhalese conflicts that threaten to tear apart his homeland, Arjie painfully grows toward manhood and an understanding of his own “different” identity.
Set in the mannered, lush world of upper middle class Tamils in Sri Lanka, this deeply moving novel, though not autobiographical, draws on Selvadurai’s experience of being gay in Sri Lanka and growing up during the escalating violence between the Buddhist Sinhala majority and Hindu Tamil minority in the 1970’s and early 1980’s.
Refreshing, raw, and poignant, Funny Boy is an exquisitely written, compassionate tale of a boy’s coming-of-age that quietly confounds expectations of love, family, and country as it delivers the powerful message of staying true to one’s self no matter the obstacles.
“Selvadurai writes as sensitively about the emotional intensity of adolescence as he does about the wonder of childhood.” —New York Times Book Review
View on Amazon | Bookshop.org | SecondSale used book
FIND THE BOOK INTERESTING?
Join our online book club in Facebook if you haven’t already. You can post on any bookish topic including, but not limited to, global reads. At the end of June, we’ll be discussing the Sri Lankan book above in an online event for 5 days which you can pop in & out of at any time.
