I read these four novellas one at a time over a period of a few months. The four stories represent four variations on a single theme: They're all reveries presenting an adult protagonist returning to his childhood home in search of some elusive component of his younger self. Each story is told as a pastiche of floating recollections, moving back and forth in time, often settling on the same spot several times, ultimately creating a wavering thread of longing and regret connecting the realities of adulthood and the unreachable events of the past. In most of the stories, the rural setting of childhood has been paved and built over by an intrusive modern world.

A childhood pet, a man's recollections of a strained relationship with his father, an early, regretted love and a search for the history of a beloved grandmother, long since dead, form the quadrangle of concerns that buttress the collection's recurrent themes. Another repeating theme is the way in which the lies adults tell their children help erode our feelings of trust and security at an early age, and represent to the child a far greater betrayal then most adults ever suspect.

The stories are all good, but I'm glad I didn't read them all straight through, as I believe they would have come to seem repetitive. The title story, about a man's sorrowful memories of the dog he owned as a young boy, is by far the strongest. It's really quite a jewel. But it doesn't help the rest of the collection that this story is presented first.

All in all, I am left with the feeling that there is a lot of insight and beauty here. ( )

I tried to read this book a couple of times. Both times I became bogged down in description and rather flowery prose that took much too long to say what needed to be said. There may be rewards in store for those who finish the long first story in the book. Unfortunately, I didn't make. I hope Tony had a happy ending. ( )

"Bringing Tony Home", a title from one of the main short stories in this collection by Sri Lankan writer and filmmaker Tissa Abeysekara, was rather a long tedious exercise. Though I appreciate the author's need to set the time and place in such meticulous fashion, probably stemming from his camera eye's perspective, I found reading his descriptions almost impossible without losing a sense of the story. I believe most of the stories in his book were autobiographical, and I would have loved to delve into more of them, but the title story was so exhausting to read that I will never know the rest of his tales. I will look forward to a visual retelling sometime in the future, I hope. ( )

Some heartbreaking little stories in this one - the travails of childhood. Enjoyed it quite thoroughly, but one of the difficulties for me, as an American reader, is that Abeysekara is often meticulous in his details (& often very visual in a way that reminds one of film descriptions), so that, having a different cultural background, my pace of reading slowed considerably. Hard to visualize that for which is there no visual referent. Nevertheless, gorgeous prose. ( )

Bringing Tony Home is a collection of four short stories by Tissa Abeysekara. I attempted to read this collection a couple of times but I just not get interested in it. ( )