Reef

Reef is Romesh Gunesekera's first novel, published by Granta in 1994 and shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Its narrator is Triton, a servant in a household on the coast of Sri Lanka, and the book follows him from boyhood through a life spent in kitchens and in the memory of them.

Triton's employer, Mr. Salgado, is a marine biologist more interested in swamps, tides and the reef offshore than in the people around him, and Triton's way of understanding him is through food. The novel's early chapters are about learning a craft: how to shop, how to season, and how to make a meal that will keep a difficult man at his own table. Cooking becomes the language the two of them use with each other, and the book is as much about the discipline of a kitchen as about the reef Salgado cannot stop studying.

The political unrest that will change everything is present in the margins long before it reaches the story, in rumours, in the people who come and go, and in the growing presence of a man named Wijetunga. Gunesekera describes the ordinary business of a household in precise detail, which is what makes the turn toward loss so effective when it comes. The last part of the book looks back at that household from a distance, and what Triton has lost by the time he is telling the story is both personal and national.