Beggar’s Feast
Randy Boyagoda’s Beggar’s Feast is a tour de force of a novel set in Sri Lanka about a man living in defiance of fate.
Sam Kandy, born in 1899 in a poor village in the heart of Ceylon and abandoned by his family ten years later at the gates of a remote temple, resolves to make his own luck amongst the cheats and chancers of the world. When twenty years reckoning with the streets of Colombo, the docks of Sydney and the brothels of Singapore lead Sam back to his blighted birth village, he returns as a steely self-made man. He marries a nobleman’s daughter and coldly pursues a life of wealth, prestige, and power.
And so begins a devastating chain of events, in which families are torn apart, fortunes are made and lost, and old ways and wants collide with modernity’s new machines and money and desires. Just as Sam Kandy is called back to his roots and longs for a chance to prove himself to a people and a place that gave up on him long before, ambition, reinvention, tradition and family each demand an answer: what does it cost a man to rewrite his history?
Praise & Reviews
“A postcolonial Gatsby … a satirical feast”
–The Globe and Mail
“Ambitious…a narrative that spans the whole of the last century”
–Financial Times
“The story of a Ceylonese Odysseus … gleaming, ambitious”
–New York Times
“Beggar’s Feast tackles the grand questions of the 20th century – reinvention, power, sacrifice – but what lies at the heart of this sweeping novel is a more intimate concern: how to find peace in an unforgiving world. In Sam Kandy, Randy Boyagoda has created a truly memorable character”
–Tash Aw
“A brilliant book”
–Nadeem Aslam
“a multifaceted, engrossing story… Prepare for a verbal feast that will thoroughly entertain and satisfy, yet leave you hungering for more.”
— Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“. . . a parable for modernized, globalized, restless identity.”
— New York Journal of Books
“Boyagoda does a superb job of telling this century-long tale… It’s entertaining, with much insight into the life and times of that era in the East. Recommended.”
— Historical Novels Review
“Rags-to-riches narratives seldom have much humbler starting points than the Ceylon village where Beggar’s Feast’s protagonist is born … He’s Naipaul’s Mr. Biswas as unapologetic success rather than embittered failure, Richler’s Duddy Kravitz followed far past his apprenticeship. If you’ve found a place in your heart for either of those complicated figures, make way for Sam Kandy.”
—The Gazette
“Boyagoda, a sharp and subtle writer, slips easily into many different characters’ heads and their internal rhythms, and lyrical lines abound … A satirical feast.”
—The Globe and Mail
“[Boyagoda’s narrative voice] is as lush as the tropical landscape of Ceylon … The language is also charged with vitality and allows for the emergence, from time to time, of stark human truths.”
—National Post