- Paperback: 224 pages
- Publisher: North Atlantic Books (Nov 25 2008)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1556437579
- ISBN-13: 978-1556437571
- Product Dimensions: 14 x 1.6 x 21.5 cm
- Shipping Weight: 299 g
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,842,262 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
Product Details |
Product Description
Review
“What is wonderful is the way Abeysekara can make a whole era hang on a single strand of memory.”
—Michael Ondaatje, Booker Prize winning author of The English Patient
"These multilayered stories, worth repeat reading, make a welcome introduction to Abeysekara and his homeland."
—Publishers Weekly
“Impressions of youth—painful lessons learned, emotions intensely experienced and adulthood broached—are reconsidered from the perspective of maturity in these long, sensuously detailed fictions.… A sophisticated jigsaw of a book, sensitively…mixing memory and history with regret and rites of passage.”
—Kirkus Reviews
"Bringing Tony Home is a collection of short stories from Tissa Abeysekara, who provokes the strange coincidences of life...highly recommended reading for fans of short fiction."
—The Midwest Book Review
—Michael Ondaatje, Booker Prize winning author of The English Patient
"These multilayered stories, worth repeat reading, make a welcome introduction to Abeysekara and his homeland."
—Publishers Weekly
“Impressions of youth—painful lessons learned, emotions intensely experienced and adulthood broached—are reconsidered from the perspective of maturity in these long, sensuously detailed fictions.… A sophisticated jigsaw of a book, sensitively…mixing memory and history with regret and rites of passage.”
—Kirkus Reviews
"Bringing Tony Home is a collection of short stories from Tissa Abeysekara, who provokes the strange coincidences of life...highly recommended reading for fans of short fiction."
—The Midwest Book Review
Product Description
Set in the 1940s and 1960s, Bringing Tony Home is a masterful modern example of a timeless genre, the bildungsroman. In the title novella, a boy returns to his old home to find Tony, his beloved dog who was abandoned when economic circumstances forced the family to leave. “Bringing Tony Home” recounts this perilous journey in detail, movingly tracing the boy’s rescue attempts and his spiraling emotions as he endures changes occurring in his family. In “Elsewhere: Something Like a Love Story,” a young boy finds forbidden love with a schoolmate scorned for her poverty. “Elsewhere” continues their saga, touching on the bittersweet memories they share as adults, and on the woman’s increasingly precarious place in a society concerned only with status. The other stories, “Poor Young Man: A Requiem” and “Hark, The Moaning Pond: A Grandmother’s Tale,” delve into a young man’s relationship with his father as the latter’s fortunes fade, and into the now-mature man’s attempts to come to grips with the death of his grandmother and what she symbolized. Abeysekara’s ability to evoke the sights and sounds of another time and place, and his skill in rendering the inner lives of his characters, make Bringing Tony Home a remarkable read.
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organize and find favorite items. |
Customer Reviews
|
There are no customer reviews yet on Amazon.ca
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
4.2 out of 5 stars (5 customer reviews)
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Rewarding Read, Dec 30 2008
By librtea - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Bringing Tony Home (Paperback)
Bringing Tony Home by Tissa Abeysekara is a collection of four interrelated stories set in Sri Lanka. Each story may be read and enjoyed individually, but read together they provide a broader perspective and deeper understanding of the main character, who narrates the stories. The narrator recounts key periods in his life - his life as a child, as a young adult, and as a man. His stories recall memories of family, loss, and growing up; events that influenced the person he would become. By recalling these memories and examining them to try and separate things real and imagined, the narrator begins to understand himself better. He learns that images from memory are often illusory and constantly changing and yet, no matter how difficult they are to pin down, something true and meaningful can be culled from them.Although I would not have said so after the first several pages, Bringing Tony Home is a richly engaging book. I was initially distracted by so much description of the setting in the first story, and got a bit lost along the Old Road, High Level Road, gravel path, cart track, thick leafy veralu trees, and elbow bends, etc. But the disorientation was short-lived and I was rewarded with a highly original story that I won't soon forget. Because the book contains four stories, it seems natural to choose a favorite. I have two: Elsewhere: Something Like a Love Story and Hark, the Moaning Pond: A Grandmother's Tale. These are the last two stories in the book. Please don't short-change yourself, though. You will want to read the book cover to cover
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars
A puzzling mix of great story-telling and overkill descriptiveness, Jun 11 2010
By Timothy J. Bazzett "ReedCityBoy" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Bringing Tony Home (Paperback)
I found this book a rather tough nut to crack, and I think part of my difficulty was simply a cultural divide. Sri Lanka is a long way from Michigan, after all. But my biggest problem was with the density of the descriptions and the impossibly long run-on sentences, particularly in the title story, "Bringing Tony Home." There was, I thought, a kind of "bait and switch" at work here, both in the title and in the cover picture of a dog. Because when people read about a little boy looking for his dog left behind in a family move (of decidedly downward social mobility), they quite naturally think, oh boy, a good "dog story." But it's not. There is, in fact, precious little here about poor Tony the dog. No, this is a very thinly disguised memoir of Abeysekara's boyhood, which was not, apparently, a very easy or happy one. And the story itself - what there is of it - is very nearly strangled by the very "details" that author Michael Ondaatje praises in a cover blurb.The one story of the book's four which I found most accessible was "Elsewhere," a moving tale of adolescent sexual awakening and then adult disappointments, serial marriages and adultery. In this story, which shifts skillfully and easily back and forth between past and present, there were fewer irrelevant details to detract from the story. I wished "Elsewhere" had been longer and had been more central to the book, because it was the only piece which successfully sustained my interest.
Bringing Tony Home is not a bad book, but neither is it one I could heartily recommend to the casual American reader. As I said earlier, it could be a cultural thing, but I have read many books set in other countries and found most of them much more accessible than this one. - Tim Bazzett, author of SOLDIER BOY: AT PLAY IN THE ASA
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Highly recommended reading for fans of short fiction, April 13 2009
By Midwest Book Review - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Bringing Tony Home (Paperback)
Life has a strange habit of throwing curve balls. "Bringing Tony Home" is a collection of short stories from Tissa Abeysekara, who provokes the strange coincidences of life. Winning many awards, the stories range from lost dogs, rediscovering past flames, parents, ancestry, and more. Using the written word as a beautiful paintbrush, "Bringing Tony Home" is unique and highly recommended reading for fans of short fiction.
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
