SOURCE: "No Island Stays an Island," in The New York Times Book Review, March 26, 1995, p. 29.

[Hower is an American short story writer, novelist, critic, and educator. In the following review he compares Reef to Kazuo Ishiguro's Remains of the Day (1989) and Michael Ondaatje's Running the Family (1982), praising Gunesekera's ability to cast "a spell of nostalgia."]

"It was small, and yet its voice could fill the whole garden," says the narrator of Reef, describing an oriole that alights near his house. "In blissful ignorance it is completely beautiful; unruffled until its last moment." Lost innocence in the final years before a war is the theme of this eloquent first novel by Romesh Gunesekera, whose Monkfish Moon, a collection of stories about his homeland of Sri Lanka, attracted critical attention here in 1993. Reef was a finalist for Britain's Booker Prize last year.

Now an adult in exile in London, the...