It’s not just the hook, though the hook is peculiar and oddly affecting. "When I was writing," the author al-lows, "I really thought to myself, Who on Earth is go-ing to want to read about a fifteen-year-old kid with a disability living in Swindon with his father? And I thought, I better make the plot good." The hook— the plot ? is significantly better than good, but it’s the irresistible voice of Mark Haddon’s young narrator, Christopher Boone, that elevates this literary debut to fantastic heights.

It was seven minutes after midnight. The dog was lying on the grass in the middle of the lawn in front of Mrs. Shears’ house. Its eyes were closed. It looked as if it was running on its side, the way dogs run when they think they are chasing a cat in a dream. But the dog was not running or asleep. The dog was dead. There was a garden fork sticking out of the dog.

"This is a murder mystery novel," the boy with Behavioral Problems explains a few pages further on. A fan of Sherlock Holmes stories, Christopher decides to investigate the poodle’s murder and turn the story into a book of his own.

Christopher is quite good at puzzles, at math, and at remembering. He is, however, entirely incapable of delineating among the various grades of human emotion on the scale between happy and sad, which makes for a curious, if not altogether perplexing perspective. The narrator may not recognise them, but emotions lurk behind virtually every clue he uncovers.

Still, his pitch never varies. Christopher never slips off course. The author’s foremost accomplishment, in a book chock full of them, is to deliver a wrenching domestic fiction in such clipped, deductive prose. The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time is an emotional roller coaster. And as if that’s not enough, it’s often very funny, too.

"It’s hilarious on one page," a member of the Powells.com customer service department commented upon returning the company copy to its shelf in the office, "then two pages later you want to cry."

Dave: Where did you find the original impulse to write this novel? I know that it wasn’t a matter of you thinking you’d write a book about an autistic boy, as some might presume.

Mark Haddon: No, very deliberately not. And I think if I had done that I’d have run the risk of producing a very stolid, earnest, and over-worthy book.

It came from the image of the dead dog with the fork through it. I just wanted a good image on that first page. To me, that was gripping and vivid, and it stuck in your head. Only when I was writing it did I realise, at least to my mind, that it was also quite funny. But it was only funny if you described it in the voice that I used in the book.

So the dog came along first, then the voice. Only after a few pages did I really start to ask, Who does the voice belong to? So Christopher came along, in fact, after the book had already got underway.

Dave: Did that seem a daunting prospect at first? How long did it take to develop Christopher into the character he became?

Haddon: I think once I heard the voice I knew that Christopher would be quite easy. I started writing in that voice, and I found it so engaging myself that I knew I could write in the voice for a long time.

The more difficult thing was constructing the shape of the story. I knew there was a story; once you find a dog with a fork through it, you know there’s a story there. The more difficult puzzle was this: I wanted the whole book to be in Christopher’s voice, but the paradox is that if Christopher were real he would find it very hard, if not impossible, to write a book.

The one thing he cannot do is put himself in someone else’s shoes, and the one thing you have to do if you write a book is put yourself in someone else’s shoes. The reader’s shoes. You’ve got to entertain them, and there’s no way he could have done that.

It took me a while to figure out that puzzle. The answer I came up with is having him be a fan of the Sherlock Holmes stories. That way, he doesn’t have to put himself in the mind of a reader. He just has to say, I enjoy Sherlock Holmes stories and I’ll try to do something similar to that. It was that. That was the biggest puzzle for the book. When I solved that, I began to see how I could shape the story.

Dave: The book is being marketed as both a literary novel and a story for young adults. Did you have a readership in mind as you were putting it together?

Haddon: It was definitely for adults, but maybe I should say more specifically: It was for myself. I’ve been writing for kids for a long time, and if you’re writing for kids you’re kind of writing for the kid you used to be at that age. You cast your mind back and think, What would I have liked at age seven or five or ten? I felt a great sense of freedom with this book because I felt like I was writing it for me.

I think all writers do that, all adult writers: be both reader and writer at the same time. Consequently, I was quite surprised when I gave it to my agent and she said, "Let’s try it with both adult and children’s publishers and see what happens." I was really quite surprised and, truth to tell, perhaps a bit disappointed because I’d spent a lot of effort trying to move away from writing for children. Here I thought, Maybe I’m about to slip back inside the ghetto again.

Dave: You still have to sit at the kids’ table.

Haddon: But what happened in the UK was that we got a very good adult publisher and a good children’s publisher that wanted to publish a parallel edition, so who can complain about that? It’s the same book in a slightly different cover.

Dave: Yet what makes the book so successful is that it would seem to transcend those kind of targeted marketing efforts. Christopher, in a way, is ageless. You don’t necessarily think of him as a child when you’re reading because many of his faculties are advanced well beyond an adult’s.

Haddon: One of the things I like about the book, if I’m allowed to say that about my own book, is something I realised quite early on: It has a very simple surface, but there are layers of irony and paradox all the way through it. Here is a fiction about a character who says he can only tell the truth, he can’t tell lies but he gets everything wrong. Here is a narrator who seems to be hugely ill-equipped for writing a book he can’t understand metaphor, he can’t understand other people’s emotions, he misses the bigger picture and yet it makes him incredibly well suited to narrating a book.

He never explains too much. He never tries to persuade the reader to feel about things this way or that way; he just kind of paints this picture and says, "Make of it what you will." Which is a kind of writing that many writers are searching for all the time.

Also and this has become something very important to me it’s not just a book about disability. Obviously, on some level it is, but on another level, and this is a level that I think only perhaps adults will get, it’s a book about books, about what you can do with words and what it means to communicate with someone in a book. Here’s a character whom if you met him in real life you’d never, ever get inside his head. Yet something magical happens when you write a novel about him. You slip inside his head, and it seems like the most natural thing in the world.

Dave: Upon finishing it, I was left wondering, Is this book about Christopher? To me, and I think to many adult readers, the story he tells of everyone around him resonates at least as much as his own.

Haddon: Yeah. I think that mirrors the position of a writer, of me, because I think most writers feel like they’re on the outside looking in much of the time. But we all feel that sometimes. All of us feel, to a certain extent, alienated from the stuff going on around us. And all of us at some point, rather like Christopher, have chaos entering our lives. We have these limited strategies we desperately use to try to put our lives back in order. So although in some senses he’s a very odd and alien character, his situation is not that far removed from situations we’ve all been in at one time or another.

Dave: The father and the mother: I imagine their world, and I see two people who didn’t plan for this situation. They weren’t prepared to take this on. Now they don’t know how to cope.

Haddon: One of the strange things about his parents is that different readers feel very, very different things about them. Particularly his father. Some people say he’s a good man struggling in difficult conditions; other people say, "The guy’s a psychopath." And I think that’s one of the functions of Christopher’s voice. He paints a very sparse picture of the world around him. You only see little bits of his father and little bits of his mother. Readers bring to those characters what they want. Some people paint one picture and some people paint another.

People have said to me that it’s a desperately sad book and they wept most of the way through it. Other people say it’s charming and they kept laughing all the time. People say it has a sad ending; people say it has a happy ending. Because Christopher doesn’t force the reader to think one thing and another, I get many different reactions.

Dave: I’m finding the novel much funnier as I read it a second time.

Haddon: Strangely, I did, too, as well.

Isankya Kodithuwakku’s collec-tion of short stories, the Ba-nana Tree Crisis, was awarded the coveted 2006 Gratiaen Prize. The award was announced at a ceremony organised by the Gratiaen Trust in Colombo recently. The Gratiaen award is a literary prize gifted by Michael Ondaatje with the money he received from the 1992 Booker Prize for The English Patient.

This annual prize is given for the best English writing in Sri Lanka and is recognised as the premier literary award for writing in English in Sri Lanka. The 2006 prize was jointly awarded to Isankya and she is perhaps the youngest prize winner to date.

Isankya Kodithuwakku was born and raised in Sri Lanka. Accompanying her father on a couple of diplomatic assignments to Japan and South Korea, she received some of the primary schooling there and got the opportunity to travel widely. On completion of her school education at Ladies’ College and Visakha Vidyalaya in Sri Lanka, she was selected to the University of Sri Jayawardenepura in the mathematics stream.

However, since she received a scholarship to Kenyon College, a small liberal arts college in Ohio, she moved there in 2001. She gave up her mathematics major to concentrate on writing and graduated with her Bachelor’s degree with highest honours.

Returning to Sri Lanka, she subsequently spent a year working with the Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement, mainly involved with writing reports on the organisation’s tsunami relief activities. In mid-August last year, she moved to New York to read for the Master of Fine Arts (MFA) at the prestigious Columbia University, where she received a fellowship to undertake postgraduate studies in writing.

This debut collection of short stories maps the journeys of individuals from diverse locations and lifestyles around Sri Lanka. The characters in these stories come from all corners of Sri Lanka and all strata of life in the island. What unites these characters though is their intense desire to follow their dreams. The Banana Tree Crisis was published by Vijitha Yapa publications, which was unafraid to take a chance with a new writer, which is very much appreciated by Isankya.

Isankya is the daughter of Chandani and Dr Karunasena Kodithuwakku.

The Killer by Lishan Perera

It is not surprising that very few readers would have heard about Lishan Perera, for he is only 12 years old and The Killer is his first published novel.

Young Lishan is a student at the Colombo International School and as one interested in crime and mystery stories, has presented his own story, The Killer, weaving it around a character Joe Harper.

Joe was 14 years old.Two years back he and his mother had met with a motor car accident. He survived but not the mother. Since then he had been experiencing nightmares regularly. After sometime they stopped but again started and this time they were not about the accident but about a killer.

Joe’s father had taken him to a psychotherapist for treatment. But Joe’s nightmares continued and they were actually happening so much so that it looked like him having a sixth sense.

The victims were always police officers. But when the killer found out that Joe’s nightmares were providing clues to his identity, he was also after Joe.

As a thriller should be, all throughout the book Lishan keeps the reader in suspense, coaxing him to read the gripping story .His command of the language makes it doubly interesting. The few lines picked at random and quoted below are an example.

"I was walking along a beach. It was dark and a bright full moon hung above the calm water.

I was feeling relaxed –relaxed and calm. My feet sank into the soft yellow sand, a cool breeze swept in my hair and the sea lapped against my ankles.

I was walking along, arms outstretched, admiring the beauty of my surroundings .Stars twinkled from heavens and I seemed to be all alone. On the far edge of the beach the mangrove and coconut trees swayed to and fro in the ever so gentle breeze."

And then, the unexpected.

"But I had made a mistake. I was not alone"

Lishan has woven his novel in the backdrop of Los Angeles. I felt that if he had based it on Sri Lanka it would have been more appealing to the local readers.

As mentioned in the back cover of the book Lishan must be a voracious reader and would have been much influenced by his reading. Yet, to come up with a book so well crafted at the age of 12 is something to be admired and appreciated. His readers no doubt would wish many more publications from his pen in time to come.