Ashok Ferrey’s first book in five years, The Unmarriageable Man, will be launched at Sarasavi Bookshop, One Galle Face Mall, Colombo 3, on Saturday March 27 at 4.30 pm.
When his Sri Lankan father dies, Sanjay de Silva decides to visit England – for no other reason than that his father has always prevented him from doing so. It is 1980. Sanjay arrives in London to find that real estate has become the national obsession, the Tulip Fever of the age. He meets and falls in love with Janine, old enough to be his mother, infamous within the acid-tongued Sri Lankan community as a hooker of the highest class, with royalclients.
Sanjay becomes the only Asian builder in one of London’s most violent parts, Brixton – where the black inhabitants are fast being replaced by young white yuppies, where every girl looks like Princess Diana though not every boy looks like Prince Charles. But all is not well with that first house he buys. At night there are voices.
At its deepest level, The Unmarriageable Man is about grief: how each of us copesin our inimitable way, often running directly against the grain of received wisdom. How, as Sanjay is about to find out, ‘grief is only the transmutation of love, of the same chemical composition – liquid, undistilled – the one inevitably turning to the other like ice to water.’