Fiction January 1, 1

Two-thirds of the way through The Match, an exacting yet tender novel about expatriate life, its protagonist, Sunny Fernando, visits Sri Lanka for the first time since childhood. He goes to look for the house he grew up in and finds it gone: “None of the things that had made up his early world, imprinted as images on his brain, existed any more. Everything had been violated. There was no past—no place, no people—except what he remembered. It frightened him.”