It’s nearly the end of 2024, and I have read well beyond my Goodreads target of 52 books, but my review count sits at zero. Scrolling back through my year’s reading to find a review candidate this one stands out from the British and Australian crime fiction that I have inhaled by the dozen.
The title and the cover are misleading. This is not a cozy book, not a twee tale of senior citizens getting up to some mild hijinks in their twilight years. This is the worthy winner of the 2023 Miles Franklin Literary Award, an annual prize awarded to “a novel which is of the highest literary merit and presents Australian life in any of its phases”. Sadly, but truly, the phase of Australian life that this book explores is racism.
Cinnamon Gardens is an aged care home, rebuilt in the 1980s by Maya and Zakhir, Tamil academics fleeing civil war in Sri Lanka. Maya is now a resident, her daughter Anjali running the home, while Zakhir is missing, presumed dead, after returning to Sri Lanka. The residents are predominantly, but not exclusively, also Sri Lankan immigrants, reflecting the demographics of the surrounding Western Sydney suburbs and the culturally safe care provided.
Chandran contrasts Sri Lankan history, where racism was encoded in law and state-sanctioned violence was overt with the more polite hierarchies of Australia, where advantages are so deeply embedded that they are made invisible.
The narrative is split between dives into the past, as the civil war experiences of Maya, Zakhir and Cinnamon Gardens staffer Ruben are revealed and the present, as Anjali’s friend Gareth attempts to lash out at personal hurts and hold onto his third-rate political power on the local council. Accusations of racism can play well in the polls if they are turned against immigrant communities who aren’t sufficiently grateful to be in Australia and dare to criticise it, but once lit, that is a fire that is difficult to extinguish.