Roma Tearne’s book Bone China is a tale of family, love, and painful choices amidst a period of unrest and war in Sri-Lanka. It centers on Grace, and her family, a once wealthy English-speaking Catholic Tamil family. With rising Sinhalese nationalism and a shift of power from the British, this Tamil family like many others are the victims of ethnic violence, and systematic discrimination that slowly eats at their place in society and government. This civil unrest forces each of the family members to make difficult choices, and forces them to part their separate ways. Throughout, each character grapples with their own private struggles of love, loss, identity and must find a way to overcome them. The plot of the story unravels over four generations, yet each of their stories are interlinked and tied to their past and roots. Civil unrest has undoubtedly changed Grace and the rest of the De Silva family, while some of them try to place the past and the tension of their land behind them, others find that they simply cannot erase their history, for its connection to their family are inseparable. Tearne explores many concepts in her book: family, power, caste, identity, immigration and politics – she then weaves them together into a beautiful story, Bone China.
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