One of the spring’s most anticipated books has been a very long time coming. The Hungry Ghosts, the new novel by Shyam Selvadurai, is the Toronto writer’s first title for adults in over a decade.

It took Selvadurai 13 years to write the book, which he calls “intensely personal, but not autobiographical.” The story follows a young, gay Canadian immigrant who returns to Sri Lanka with his mother to retrieve his dying grandmother. The title is inspired by the myth of a “hungry ghost,” a soul that wanted too much in life and, in the afterlife, is saddled with a mouth too small to fulfill its appetite.

Selvadurai burst onto the Canadian literary scene in 1994 with his first novel, Funny Boy (published by McClelland & Stewart). Not quite 30 at the time, Selvadurai was a young gay man who had immigrated from Sri Lanka a decade earlier at the age of 19. His country of origin and his assured, elegant prose invited comparisons to Michael Ondaatje.

In 1998, Selvadurai published a second novel, The Cinnamon Garden, set in 1920s Ceylon. The book tackled similar themes as those found in Funny Boy: Sri Lankan politics and homosexual identity. But then, aside from his 2005 young-adult novel, Swimming in the Monsoon Sea, and an anthology of South Asian literature he edited, there was little word from the author.

One major reason for the silence was a sort of spiritual awakening he experienced in 2005. Raised Catholic, Selvadurai was inspired to explore Buddhist theology after reading Karen Armstrong’s biography, Buddha. He attended a Tibetan Buddhism centre for a while, but soon discovered he wasn’t much of a joiner.

“I don’t consider myself a Buddhist, but Buddhism does influence my life,” he says on the phone from Vancouver, where he is currently writer-in-residence at the University of British Columbia’s Green College. “It’s about how you choose to live in the world.”

That influence compelled Selvadurai to rewrite an earlier version of his manuscript, incorporating several Buddhist philosophies that had become important to him, such as karmic retribution and eternal return. “Everything you do has a consequence, and you have to deal with the consequence,” he says.

In 2010, The Hungry Ghosts found a home as the first novel acquired by Doubleday Canada’s new publishing director, Lynn Henry, who was familiar with Selvadurai’s previous work and was very keen to work with him. But the novel, with a publication date originally scheduled for fall 2011, faced more delays after Selvadurai submitted an early draft.

“You take a leap of faith about a novel’s potential, but the final quarter of the novel didn’t really weave in properly,” says Henry. “We gave ourselves a break, and he rewrote it and really made it work.”

Selvadurai knew he had to finish writing the novel, no matter how long it took. “I felt I couldn’t call myself a writer, I couldn’t move forward, until I got this story down,” he says. “It’s about what I refer to as the ‘0.5 generation’ – neither first- nor second-generation immigrants, like me. I wanted to write the book I wanted to read.”

Selvadurai regularly travels back to Sri Lanka, and is planning a trip there this winter to work with Write to Reconcile, an organization that helps emerging authors develop stories on themes of peace and reconciliation. His writing depends on it, he admits. “My blood flows through [Sri Lanka]. If I’m away too long, it dries up. I don’t know what that’s about, but I need both [countries].”

In The Hungry Ghosts, Selvadurai writes more about his adopted country than in his previous novels, something he found to be a challenge. “One of the hardest things was to write about Canada,” he says. “Maybe because Toronto … has no village main street, it’s so amorphous. It took me a while to get it.”

Now that his book is finally seeing the light of day, Selvadurai is reticent to reveal his next project – not out of superstition, but more out of a sense of creative self-­protection. “I want to be free to fail,” he says.