Brixton Beach

A quotation from Rudyard Kipling concludes Roma Tearne’s third novel Brixton Beach — “If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten”.

In 1964 she left her troubled and beautiful homeland on the brink of civil war. Now she melds fact and fiction in this moving story, underpinned with autobiographical elements of her life.

Alice, the central character, echoes Tearne’s own life, having left the unhappy country of Sri Lanka with her Tamil father and Sinhalese mother for Britain, which is also caught up in ethnic dissension and problems of migration.

The first chapter of Brixton Beach opens on a July day in 2005 when a suicide bomber brings the capital to a standstill. Simon Swann, a devoted doctor, is desperately searching for someone he loves.

We then go back 30 years to meet three generations of the Fonseka family in Sri Lanka. At its head is Bee, the caring patriarch, with his two daughters Sita and May and his beloved nine-year-old granddaughter Alice, the central character, who cares more for her grandfather than anyone else.

She and her mother leave their beautiful troubled island for London, where they have neither friends nor family. A broken woman, Sita had just lost her second child at birth in the hospital due to the neglect of a Sinhalese doctor. The relationship between mother and daughter is a tense one, not helped by her parent’s loveless marriage and bitter divorce. Alice grows up a lonely, isolated girl. She, too, then has an unhappy marriage and a son who turns away from his mother.

Left alone, she slowly begins to fill her home with the colours of the sea. “Sandwiched between two worlds”, she finally finds her way and becomes an unusual and gifted artist, fulfilling her grandfather's hopes for her. At last, she finds love and begins to bloom in this alien country.

As well as writing novels, Tearne is also a painter, sculptor and film-maker and is a creative writing fellow at Oxford Brookes University.

But memories of Sri Lanka, its rich landscape, the sea and the brilliant plants and flowers of her island home inform her art and her writing.

Even now her country is still caught up in the bitter conflict between two ethnic groups, the Tamil minority and the majority ruling Sinhalese.

l Roma Tearne’s film Watermuseum is at the Ovada Gallery, Gloucester Green, Oxford, until Saturday. Investigating the lost stories and memories of strangers, inspired by objects discovered in museum collections, it focuses on the Museo Navale, Venice. It is a culmination of work made during her AHRC Fellowship in Visual Arts at Oxford Brookes University.