Mosquito
Page 28
Outside the evening was just beginning in Venice. The orchestra in St Mark’s square was playing again. Great seagulls perched jauntily on the briccole dotted across the lagoon, watching as the fishermen brought in their catch. And all around, between sea and sky and land, was the gentle sound of lapping water as the sun, golden and full of autumn warmth, sank softly into the reeds.
Acknowledgements
My agent Felicity Bryan, who knew my paintings long before she read my words, for her unwavering encouragement and her determination to keep me going.
Kathy van Praag, who read the manuscript and was so wholeheartedly enthusiastic.
And Clare Smith, my editor at HarperPress, who loved the book enough to make it happen.
Also at HarperPress, Annabel, Julian and Mally, all of whom made life easier for me.
To Michele Topham, at the Felicity Bryan Agency.
To my exhuberant Italian friends Rosy Colombo and Anna Anzi for their support, seminars and summer retreats during the writing of the book.
To Loretta Innocenti for her support in Venice, and Daniele Lombardi for his wonderful recording of Preludes Fragiles, which I listened to endlessly whilst writing.
To Vishvarani Wanigasekera, who corrected my Singhalese.
And finally to my long-suffering family, sternest and wisest of critics.
Thank you.
International Acclaim For Mosquito
Shortlisted for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award
and the Costa First Novel Award
Finalist for the Kiriyama Prize
“Heart-rending…Readers of this powerful novel cannot fail to be moved…but they will also realize that, as well as being a rebuke to indifference, the book is about hope and survival.”
—Christopher Ondaatje, The Spectator (UK)
“Mosquito lyrically captures a country drenched in both incomparable beauty and the stink of hatred.”
—The Guardian
“Lovely, vividly described.”
—The Times (London)
“Tearne brings her skills as a painter to her writing, creating some extraordinarily lovely portraits of Sri Lankan land and seascapes, a stunning backdrop to the changing horrors of the country’s twenty-year civil war. Anyone who has visited, or has a passing interest in Sri Lanka, should read this beautiful novel.”
—Sunday Telegraph
“A complex, ambitious book from a writer with a real talent for language. We will be hearing a great deal about Ms. Tearne in the future.”
—Lauren B. Davis, author of
The Stubborn Season and The Radiant City
“[Tearne] uses her keen eye to render details of place and character in a startling and original way.…Tearne does wonderfully what any novelist writing about modern Sri Lanka must do: capture a balance between its aching beauty and its horror.”
—Shyam Selvadurai, The Globe and Mail
“Mosquito shimmers with evocative prose but it also resonates with the darkness of men’s cruelty.”
—The Courier Mail (Australia)
“A beautifully moving, suspense-filled story about unlikely lovers that’s gripping from start to finish…Tearne’s ethereal descriptions of the Sri Lankan coastline and the powerful accounts of a country ripped apart by violence make for an emotional and exceptional novel.”
—Easy Living Magazine (UK)
“Beautiful and evocative…The true horror and unreason of terrorism as depicted here speak to our own worst fears and remind us that terrorism has been with us in many guises and many places for a much longer time than we tend to remember…Gripping and original.”
—The Sydney Morning Herald
“Tearne writes like a dream. Her observations and descriptions are exquisitely wrought and one delights that such an engrossing narrative can be illustrated by such clean, lyrical prose…Mosquito is a haunting and brilliant first novel.”
—The Advertiser
Copyright
Mosquito
© 2007 by Roma Tearne.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © JULY 2010 ISBN: 978-1-554-68970-5
Published by Harper Perennial, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.
Excerpt on p. 63 © Andrew Spielman and Michael d’Antonio, Mosquito (Faber and Faber: London, 2002).
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Tearne, Roma
Mosquito / Roma Tearne.
I. Title.
PR6120.E27M68 2008 823’.92 C2008-900865-0
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