As a teenager from Sri Lanka, Sunny is living the typical life of an expatriate in 1970s Manila—a privileged, carefree existence—until one day when the secret behind his mother's tragic death years earlier is accidentally revealed to him, turning Sunny's world upside down. His life takes a series of unexpected turns—first in England, where he falls in love with the luminous Clara, and later in Sri Lanka, where he returns during a brief lull in the country's brutal ethnic war.

Reminiscent of V.S. Naipaul in his nuanced treatment of the melancholy of exile, Gunesekera takes the reader on an utterly absorbing journey across the late twentieth-century postcolonial world. Spanning three continents and thirty years, The Match is a "beautiful and atmospheric" (Irish Times) exploration of the nature of loss and displacement, the search for identity and love, and the possibility, in the end, of redemption and renewal.