SOURCE: "Sea Changes," in New Statesman & Society, Vol. 7, No. 318, September 2, 1994, p. 38.

[In the following review, Mannes-Abbott comments that although Reef is "impressive," it displays somewhat less of the "Chekhovian clarity and brevity" found in his short story collection Monkfish Moon (1992).]

In The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha wrote that it is "from those who have suffered the sentence of history—subjugation, domination, diaspora, displacement—that we learn our most enduring lessons for living and thinking". Towards the end of his first novel, Romesh Gunesekera echoes Bhabha's wide thesis, while his preoccupation, made messy and dilute by the processes of fiction, is with the lessons for living and "enlarging the world with each flick of a tongue".

Reef displays many of the qualities of Gunesekera's assured collection of stories, Monkfish Moon (1992). In them he negotiated the terrain between Sri Lanka and Britain with a ventriloquist agility in sober, quietly...