https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/dec/06/suncatcher-romesh-gunesekera-review

This lightly sketched tale moves towards an inevitable conclusion – but it’s dangerous to court comparisons with Fitzgerald when the writing is paint-by-numbers

Kairo is growing up in 1960s Sri Lanka at a moment of gathering political repression and destabilising social change. His father is a dyed-in-the-wool communist, in an armchair sort of way. His mother is trying to work out what to do about her son’s education now the schools have been suspended. But Kairo doesn’t care too much about all this. He’s just met Jay – be warned, it’s never a coincidence when the glamorous, wealthy character with the gilded life is called Jay – and he’s going to appear in a coming of age tale.

Jay has a life that Kairo finds intoxicating. His family are rich and live in a beautiful house; he has an attractive, unstable mother and a gangsterish uncle with a farm and a classic car collection; he likes to cycle, drive, shoot, build, skinny-dip, defend the helpless and all the other things boyhood heroes do. His bedroom is filled with metaphors for the contained experience of childhood – fish tanks, in this case, which also give us a hint of Jay’s possible fetish for control – but Jay and Kairo are growing up, and need a new, more apt metaphor for the half-freedom of adolescence. So they build a cage for Jay’s budgies, where Jay also keeps a sutikka, a bird native to Sri Lanka that he’s caught, which he calls his “Sunbeam”. The title of Romesh Gunesekera’s novel invites us to draw parallels between this bird and Jay. And if you haven’t worked out how the book ends already from the character’s name, you’ll have a second opportunity to see the story’s destination heavily foreshadowed in the fate of the bird.