Bøker av Roma Tearne

Drawing on Tearne's background, and experience of loss - she left Sri Lanka for the UK with her family, at the start of the civil unrest during the 1960s - the book imagines an archive and museum collection cultivated from a trunk of photographs and artefacts from an unknown donor. With no known provenance and in poor condition, the collection stands in as a substitute for the lost possessions of every dislocated individual - whether a displaced person or refugee, or simply someone who has been forced by circumstance to leave the familiar behind, losing special objects in the process. People often cannot help looking for artefacts which belong to their past, and are unable to rest if they can't find them. TRACe provides that rest - it is the story of a collection, and the house which becomes a museum to hold those possessions."On entering you will notice that the collection within these rooms appears to belong to one person alone. However, I hope that on closer inspection it will become clear that the exhibits belong to everyone who has ever lived."

A permanently frozen London is the setting for Roma Tearne's harrowing yet lyrical tale of survival in a dystopian near-future.

Despite the dark clouds of war looming on the horizon, thirteen-year-old Cecily's head is full of first love, ice cream and sibling rivalry. She looks constantly to her impossibly beautiful elder sister, Rose, with a mixture of envy and admiration. Desperately curious about Rose's secrets, and those of all the adults around her, Cecily eavesdrops at every opportunity that summer: with dire consequences. For Cecily's actions one fateful night at the outbreak of the Second World War will ultimately tear her family apart and echo across the generations. It is not until many years later that a grown-up Cecily can return to her childhood home and unravel the remaining family secrets. And finally lay some ghosts to rest.

A story of obsession, love and art set in Tuscany, Sri Lanka and London. Ras, a Sri Lankan who fled his country as a child following the violent death of his mother and his father's disappearance, has committed a crime. Dogged by his past and unable to come to terms with the killing of his mother, he struggles to make a new life for himself in the UK. Alex has loved Dee since he was 19 but failed to realise that it was a love he wouldn't find again. After Dee's marriage, he too struggles to build a meaningful life for himself.But when Ras' and Alex's lives connect, each man takes a new path culminating for Ras in the theft of a della Franceso painting, while Alex comes ever closer to Dee through tragedy in her life. Beautifully written, with a strong narrative, The Road to Urbino is the story of two very different men and their love for the women in their lives, set against the backdrop of the heartbreaking horrors of the long-running conflict in Sri Lanka.

'The Swimmer' is a gripping, captivating novel about love, loss and what home really means.Forty-three year old Ria is used to being alone. As a child, her life changed forever with the death of her beloved father and since then, she has struggled to find love.That is, until she discovers the swimmer.Ben is a young illegal immigrant from Sri Lanka who has arrived in Norfolk via Moscow. Awaiting a decision from the Home Office on his asylum application, he is discovered by Ria as he takes a daily swim in the river close to her house. He is twenty years her junior and theirs is an unconventional but deeply moving romance, defying both boundaries and cultures - and the xenophobic residents of Orford. That is, until tragedy occurs.

An epic novel of love, loss and a family uprooted, set in the contrasting landscapes of war-torn Sri Lanka and immigrant London.Grace de Silva, wife of the shiftless but charming Aloysius, has five children and a crumbling marriage. Her eldest son, Jacob, wants desperately to go to England. Thornton, the most beautiful of all the children and his mother's favourite, dreams of becoming a poet. Alicia wants to be a concert pianist. Only Frieda has no ambition, other than to remain close to her family. But civil unrest is stirring in Sri Lanka and Christopher, the youngest and the rebel of the family, is soon caught up in the tragedy that follows.As the decade unfolds against a backdrop of increasing ethnic violence, Grace watches helplessly as the life she knows begins to crumble. Slowly, this once happy family is torn apart as four of her children each make the decision to leave their home.In London, the de Silvas are all, in their different ways, desperately homesick. Caught in a cultural clash between East and West, life is not as they expected. Only Thornton's daughter, Meeka, moves confidently into a world that is full of possibilities. But nothing is as easy as it seems and she must overcome heartbreak, a terrible mistake and single parenthood before she is finally able to see the extraordinary effects of history on her family's migration.

A lyrical and profoundly moving story of love, loss and civil war, set in Sri Lanka, London and Venice.When author Theo Samarajeeva returns to his native Sri Lanka after his wife's death, he hopes to escape his gnawing loss amid the lush landscape of his increasingly war-torn country. But as he sinks into life in this beautiful, tortured land, he also finds himself slipping into friendship with an artistic young girl, Nulani, whose family is caught up in the growing turmoil. Soon friendship blossoms into love. Under the threat of civil war, their affair offers a glimmer of hope to a country on the brink of destruction...But all too soon, the violence which has cast an ominous shadow over their love story explodes, tearing them apart. Betrayed, imprisoned and tortured, Theo is gradually stripped of everything he once held dear - his writing, his humanity and, eventually, his love. Broken by the belief her lover is dead, Nulani flees Sri Lanka to a cold and lonely life of exile. As the years pass and the country descends into a morass of violence and hatred, the tragedy of Theo and Nulani's failed love spreads like a poison among friends sickened by the face of civil war, and the lovers must struggle to recover some of what they have lost and to resurrect, from the wreckage of their lives, a fragile belief in the possibility of redemption.Beautifully written, by turns heartbreaking and uplifting, `Mosquito' is a first novel of remarkable and compelling power.