Is there a greater compliment a reader can pay a novel (and by extension, the novelist) than to say, “I was sorry when life interfered and I had to put it down, and I couldn’t wait to get back to it?” Clearly, this is not a register of critical acumen, but rather of something as brutish and unthinking as pleasure.

Cinnamon Gardens is a hugely pleasurable novel. It draws its strength from those old-fashioned, momentum gathering narrative imperatives of plot, character, and setting. These take on a particular buoyancy in a novel that unfolds, as this one does, in a traditional society at a pivotal historical moment when its underpinnings are being rattled loose.

Cinnamon Gardens (the name comes from a fashionable district of Colombo) is a historical novel, set in the tropically lush and socially complex Ceylon of the 1920s. The country’s deeply entrenched horizontal and vertical divisions are being further scored by labour unrest, by calls for universal franchise, by the first glimmers of something like feminism. A young, well-born school teacher named Annalukshmi struggles to understand who and what she might become in a world where all the old certainties are being stripped away. Similarly her uncle, Balendran, a man in midlife, finds himself at odds with the very social and familial strictures that have sustained him in his place of privilege.

Cinnamon Gardens is a novel about the risks and rewards of independence. Whether the relationship at issue is political or personal, whether it is father and son, mother and daughter, husband and wife, Tamil and Sinhalese, one caste and another, colonizers and the colonized, the task handed to these memorable characters is to mediate between individual wants and requirements and the conforming pressures of the tribe. It is also wonderfully atmospheric, a fascinating and compelling portrait of a time and a place. By and large, Selvadurai has managed to sidestep the historical novelist’s bugaboo of lapsing into lecture mode. Now and again, the seams come apart so that we can see all the careful research with which Cinnamon Gardens has been stuffed, but this is a minor quibble. He is a gifted storyteller, and this is a graceful, absorbing, and intelligent novel.