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By way of full disclosure, I was the acquisition and developmental editor of this collection, so this review is in no way "objective."Tissa is a film maker of some renown in Sri Lanka; Sinhalese by birth, but a writer who adopted English as his "mother tongue" early in his writing career. He's the producer, director, and/or script writer of dozens of films and television shows, and the recipient of numerous awards in his country.What drew me to Tissa stories was his use of language--long, flowing, sensual sentences and challenging syntax that combine to create an undeniable feel for the trails and people of his youth. The setting is 1940s and 1950 Sri Lanka. At its heart, this is a collection of stories by a man, written in his later years, who is trying to make sense of his life through the retelling of these stories.A young boy loves a dog, loses him, then risks his life by walking miles to find him again, only to once again lose him, this time forever. And in the retelling years later he realizes that it was much more than the dog that he had both found, and lost ("Bringing Tony Home"). That same young boy, a few years later, finds "forbidden love" in the form of an outcast girl, only to have her tragic story unexpectedly come back to him decades later ("Elsewhere: Something Like a Love Story").In the story that has brought tears to my eye in every reading, "Hark, The Moaning Pond: A Grandmother's Tale," the narrator recounts his relationship with his grandmother -- a story the like of which that's been told a million times -- only under Tissa's spell, it quickly leaves the realm of a typical grandmother's tale and opens its wings into the mythology of Sri Lanka itself. As I said, I'm not objective. "Hark" was one of the most moving experiences I've had in my reading life.When experienced as a whole, BRINGING TONY HOME is a beautiful, beautiful read, evoking in cinematic detail a time and place lost to everything but memory, and literature.