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In cricket, there's an element of heightened ethnic identity, but everyone knows it's a sham you can easily switch teams. For Gunesekera, the game is a way of "exploring identity and belonging. One inspiration was the Trinidadian writer CLR James, whose Beyond a Boundary (1963) linked cricket to empire and independence. After the 2002 peace talks, it played a test match against England at which Sinhalese and Tamils cheered the same side. Six weeks after a suicide bombing in Colombo in 1996, Sri Lanka won the World Cup for the first time. The book is punctuated by cricket matches and political flash points. Gunesekera confesses that, though he bowled as a boy to a coconut-branch wicket, he is "not a sporty person", yet writing this sometimes humorous novel rekindled his enthusiasm for the game. Its paperback publication by Bloomsbury coincided with the Sri Lankan cricket team's reaching the world cup final. His fourth and most recent novel, The Match, traces its protagonist Sunny Fernando's passion for cricket from a Colombo childhood, through teen years in the Philippines, to adulthood in Britain. "It could as easily be Nazi Germany or Rwanda, but Sri Lanka is the one." "One reason the stories have tended to go back to that setting is my desire to understand violence," he says. But since his debut short story collection, Monkfish Moon (1992), his fiction has largely been set between Britain and Sri Lanka, or on unnamed tropical islands resembling his birthplace. Now 53, he left what was then Ceylon in 1966, before the conflict took root, moving to the Philippines aged 12, then to England at 17. "I've always written out of an urgency," he says, "because, any minute, everything can fall apart - including life." Gunesekera's fiction often touches on loss, flight, memory, the eroding passage of time and the despoilment of ostensible paradises. In Reef, the fragile, living coral is partly a metaphor for a land poised to crumble into fratricidal self-destruction.