SOURCE: "No Man Is an Island," in Book World—The Washington Post, June 25, 1995, p. 5.

[Amirthanayagam is a Sri Lankan poet and essayist and the former ambassador from his country to England. In the following favorable review, he discusses Reef as a bildungsroman in which the main character's maturation is mirrored by the political changes in Sri Lanka.]

One of the impressive adventures of the 20th century is the rapidly burgeoning interpenetration of cultures. A rich fruit of this is a type of modern literature in which the central experience is cross-cultural and characters' destinies are shaped in some fashion by the cross-cultural encounter.

Romesh Gunesekera's debut novel, Reef, which was short-listed for Britain's prestigious Booker Prize, is a successful example of cross-cultural convergence. Sri Lanka, the book's setting and the land of Gunesekera's birth, has its own ethnic mix. The island nation, which is insulated from the rest...