Homesick by Roshi Fernando; Drifting House by Krys Lee; Diving Belles by Lucy Wood; Light Lifting by Alistair MacLeod - review by Jake Kerridge

Jake Kerridge

Four Debut Short Story Collections

  • Roshi Fernando, 
  • Krys Lee, 
  • Lucy Wood, 
  • Alistair MacLeod
 

Homesickness is especially debilitating for those who don’t know where their home is – or even if they have one. In Roshi Fernando’s Homesick, a series of interconnected stories about a tight-knit group of Sri Lankan families living in south London, most of the characters are some way through the process of discovering that they don’t belong anywhere.

There is an Alice-in-Wonderland feel to much of the best fiction about immigrants in Britain, as the bemused protagonists wonder at the peculiarities of the British way of life. But in Homesick most of the characters are second-generation immigrants and superficially assimilated; it takes time for them to realise that

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter