From Booker Prize finalist Romesh Gunesekera comes a novel praised as "exquisite" (Time magazine) and "utterly engaging...romantic, mysterious, and laced with a sense of yearning." (Marie Claire) "With the same dreamlike, subdued, sinister voice that won him a Booker Prize nomination for his 1994 novel, Reef, Gunesekera travels between 1950s Sri Lanka and present-day London, tracing the intertwined lives of two rival families--through their rising and falling fortunes, death, and a mysterious disappearance."--Entertainment Weekly "A beautifully crafted novel of two warring families in contemporary Sri Lanka. Like the reluctant confession of a wayward spouse, the truth of the tale here is learned incrementally, teased out by inference and gradual revelation--elegiac in mood and rich in evocation of character and setting [The Sandglass] gracefully limns the origins of a domestic--and national--tragedy."--Kirkus Reviews "Behind the narrative"s deft and subtle interweaving of elaborate histories and fugitive memories, crashed dreams and moments of promise, there lie strong echoes of Thomas Hardy"s poetry with its delicate images of remembered pleasures and visions of despoiling loss--the Sri Lankan episodes are often Dickensian in their blend of comedy and menace, the English scenes are touched almost everywhere with lyricism and sensuousness."--Times Literary Supplement "Gunesekera has conjured up a sense of tragedy and fate, an endemic evil that speaks to us of something larger than the conscious enmity of two families."--Los Angeles Times "Totally engrossing...a brave, beautiful novel."--Sunday Telegraph