Bringing Tony Home is a breakthrough collection, including a novella and three short stories that together portray a young boy’s childhood and coming of age in 1940s and 1950s Sri Lanka. The title story follows a young boy whose family has recently suffered economic hardships and has just moved out of their home several miles away to a much smaller house, leaving the boy’s beloved dog, Tony, behind. But the boy, devoted to his dog, returns to his old home on his own to find Tony and take him by foot to the family’s new home. The story recounts the boy’s near-tragic journey, and follows him as he observes the changes in his family as they adjust to their new surroundings.In Elsewhere: Something Like a Love Story , a boy finds forbidden love with a schoolmate scorned by other students for her poverty and sexual proclivity. The love is short-lived, as a schoolmate, purporting to be the girl’s boyfriend, threatens him. The story fast-forwards 15 years when the couple meets by chance in the city.
Elsewhere touches on the bittersweet memories the two share, and follows the tragic story of the woman who, in the end, loses everything she has ever had because of her status as a woman in her community. Poor Young Man: A Requiem find the boy as a young man, just turning 21, recounting his relationship with his father during the years their family’s fortunes were disappearing. And in perhaps the collection’s most moving and stylistically complex story, Hark, The Moaning Pond: A Grandmother’s Tale , told through the boy’s eyes as a much older man, follows the young boy coming to terms with his grandmother’s death, and connecting his grandmother to the deeper story and mythology of their homeland.