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You know this island, though Romesh Gunesekera doesn't give it a name. Steeped in myth and mystery, this is the island whose first inhabitants had been awakened by "butterflies splashing dew at the dawn of time"; this is the hallucinogenic island where "the chance migrants of history" had found their original home; where the most beautiful woman in the world was brought in a Trojan peacock, "away from the tedium of a husband whose only passion was playing with bows and golden arrows". Where coconut estates "float like oasis in the forest", where wild flowers and coloured birds and fragrant air and primeval lakes exist as tropical expressionism's lush shades. And today, ransacked by war, drenched in blood, enveloped in fear, it's the lost Eden that lives in emerald memories.

HEAVEN'S EDGE By Romesh Gunesekera Bloomsbury Price: £6.50 Pages: 234

On its shores of eternal return arrives Gunesekera, once more, to reclaim, to relive, a dream, as a voyager of love, as a chosen child powered by ancestral karma. And what you have from this Sri Lankan who lives in London is a novel of terrifying beauty. A passage to memory where the history of the land and the mystery of the mind come together in a magnificently choreographed performance, dark and lyrical, tender and violent. When Marc, the traveller from London, arrives in this island where his grandfather was born and where his fighter pilot father died in the flames of a shot-down plane, he, the chaser of a dream, first discovered in an antiquated video cassette with his father's name printed on it, is weighed down by this knowledge: in this island "dreamers often have to destroy their dreams, if they are not to be destroyed by them".

A chance encounter in the forest with Uva, rebel and ecowarrior who releases emerald doves and other threatened lives to freedom, sets off the translation of the dream. It's the beginning of a deadly romance, and it's Marc's entry into a world whose distance from his grandfather's garden in London can be measured only by the wayward genes of memory. He loses Uva and becomes the adventurer in search of the beloved, and in this adventure, spanning the hills and valleys and lakes, abandoned villages and rebellious underworlds of an island at war with itself, the political and the personal become one bloody liberating experience. Secrets are revealed, ancestry is exhumed and blood is spilled as Marc, along with two partners he collected from the alleys of rebellion, journeys to heaven's edge.

It's payback time for the returning child, who alone survives the journey, and reaches the last garden, Biblical in its primal spell. And for those who are familiar with Gunesekera, Heaven's Edge is a more evolved variation of Reef, his Booker-shortlisted first novel in which the tragedy of Sri Lanka, the cracked paradise, is an elegiac echo. Here it is awesomely intimate, and Gunesekera, the most accomplished stylist from the subcontinent, captures with so much elegance and control the intimacy of the homecoming in a language that is chiselled to perfection. And there is no mystery in the imperfections of the situation. For, two years ago, when Michael Ondaatje, another Sri Lankan living in Canada, also a lyrical perfectionist in fiction, did his own homecoming in Anil's Ghost, violence was wrapped in mystery, the fantasy of the lost island was unravelled by forensic pathology and archaeological anthropology. In Heaven's Edge, there is moonlit clarity. Marc, the child who once worried about the pain of the drowning ants in his grandfather's garden, pulls the trigger and kills to keep the edge of his heaven intact, like an Adam sinned by father's dream.
If Sri Lanka is Heaven Lost, fiction has regained one, emerald and enduring.