Mini-Review

Cinnamon Gardens is a wonderful multicultural Sydney nursing home, run by a Sri Lankan-Australian family: a true community. But it gets caught up in the casual (and not-so casual) racism of modern Australia, melded with the trauma of its owners’ and residents’ Sri Lankan civil war experiences.

I very much enjoyed this book about memory, language, history, power & oppression: sometimes funny and heart-warming, sometimes very dark. It has a sprawling cast of characters, narrated from multiple third person subjective perspectives and covers a wide timeframe in a non-linear narrative. It won the 2023 Miles Franklin award.

Fyi: war, torture, sexual violence, racial prejudice & violence.

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