Longlisted for the 2016 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature!
It is the late 1980s in southern Sri Lanka. Bradley Sirisena’s father is tortured and abducted in the violent struggle for power between the state and local insurgents. Some fifteen years later, his disappearance remains unresolved.
Savi, a Sri Lankan research student long settled in the UK, has lost her way in both her thesis and her life, when she receives a wedding invitation from the uncle she would rather ignore. Meanwhile in a coastal fort in Sri Lanka, her cousin Renu continues to try to uncover the secret of Bradley’s father’s disappearance. Reunited on Savi’s return to Sri Lanka, the cousins are compelled to confront truths that put them into direct conflict in their understanding of both the past and themselves. As Bradley’s story draws to its inevitable end, the tsunami strikes and carries them all into a future that promises to be even more disturbing than the past.
The novel is a haunting evocation of intersecting lives and parallel times that draws upon real historical events. In this richly textured book, myth and magic merge, as the bustle of a seaside city in England gives way to the unreal calm of coastal communities in southern Sri Lanka where thousands disappeared without trace.
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