A stunning literary debut of two young women on opposing sides of the devastating Sri Lankan Civil War—winner of the Commonwealth Book Prize for Asia, longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize 

Before violence tore apart the tapestry of Sri Lanka and turned its pristine beaches red, there were two families. Yasodhara tells the story of her own Sinhala family, rich in love, with everything they could ask for. As a child in idyllic Colombo, Yasodhara's and her siblings' lives are shaped by social hierarchies, their parents' ambitions, teenage love and, subtly, the differences between the Tamil and Sinhala people—but this peace is shattered by the tragedies of war. Yasodhara's family escapes to Los Angeles. But Yasodhara's life has already become intertwined with a young Tamil girl's… 

Saraswathie is living in the active war zone of Sri Lanka, and hopes to become a teacher. But her dreams for the future are abruptly stamped out when she is arrested by a group of Sinhala soldiers and pulled into the very heart of the conflict that she has tried so hard to avoid – a conflict that, eventually, will connect her and Yasodhara in unexpected ways. 

In the tradition of Michael Ondatjee's Anil's Ghost and Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, Island of a Thousand Mirrors is an emotionally resonant saga of cultural heritage, heartbreaking conflict and deep family bonds. Narrated in two unforgettably authentic voices and spanning the entirety of the decades-long civil war, it offers an unparalleled portrait of a beautiful land during its most difficult moment by a spellbinding new literary talent who promises tremendous things to come.

Island of a Thousand Mirrors

With his first novel since the internationally acclaimed The English Patient, Booker Prize-winning author Michael Ondaatje gives us a work displaying all the richness of imagery and language and the piercing emotional truth that we have come to know as the hallmarks of his writing.

Anil’s Ghost transports us to Sri Lanka, a country steeped in centuries of tradition, now forced into the late twentieth century by the ravages of civil war. Into this maelstrom steps Anil Tissera, a young woman born in Sri Lanka, educated in England and America, who returns to her homeland as a forensic anthropologist sent by an international human rights group to discover the source of the organized campaigns of murder engulfing the island. What follows is a story about love, about family, about identity, about the unknown enemy, about the quest to unlock the hidden past–a story propelled by a riveting mystery. Unfolding against the deeply evocative background of Sri Lanka’s landscape and ancient civilization, Anil’s Ghost is a literary spellbinder–Michael Ondaatje’s most powerful novel yet.

Anil's Ghost

Set among the upper classes in the gracious, repressive world of 1920s Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Cinnamon Gardens by Shyam Selvadurai tells the intertwined stories of two extraordinary characters. Annalukshmi is a strong-willed young woman whose family is intent upon arranging a proper marriage for her, forcing her to question whether the independence she craves will doom her to a life without love and companionship. Her uncle Balendran, respectably married, struggles to suppress his secret desire for men. The sudden arrival of a former lover, however, threatens to destroy his carefully constructed world. Both Annalukshmi and Balendran must determine if it is possible to pursue personal happiness without compromising the happiness of others. And both must draw on hidden reserves to resist the pressures of society and, even more crushing, the expectations they have placed on themselves.

Les Jardins de cannelle

The classic novel of colonial Ceylon (Sri Lanka), first published in 1913, and written by Virginia Woolf's husband.

The Village in the Jungle

In the late 1970s Ondaatje returned to his native island of Sri Lanka. As he records his journey through the drug-like heat and intoxicating fragrances of that "pendant off the ear of India, " Ondaatje simultaneously retraces the baroque mythology of his Dutch-Ceylonese family. An inspired travel narrative and family memoir by an exceptional writer.

Running in the Family

No one sees the world quite like John Gimlette. As "The New York Times" once noted, “he writes with enormous wit, indignation, and a heightened sense of the absurd.” Writing for both the adventurer and the armchair traveler, he has an eye for unusually telling detail, a sense of wonder, and compelling curiosity for the inside story. This time, he travels to Sri Lanka, a country only now emerging from twenty-six years of civil war. Delving deep into the nation’s story, Gimlette provides us with an astonishing, multifaceted portrait of the island today.

 His travels reveal the country as never before. Beginning in the exuberant capital, Colombo (“a hint of anarchy everywhere”), he ventures out in all directions: to the dry zones where the island’s 5,800 wild elephants congregate around ancient reservoirs; through cinnamon country with its Portuguese forts; to the “Bible Belt” of Buddhism—the tsunami-ravaged southeast coast; then up into the great green highlands (“the garden in the sky”) and Kandy, the country’s eccentric, aristocratic Shangri-la. Along the way, a wild and often desperate history takes shape, a tale of great colonies (Arab, Portuguese, British, and Dutch) and of the cultural divisions that still divide this society. Before long, we’re in Jaffna and the Vanni, crucibles of the recent conflict. These areas—the hottest, driest, and least hospitable—have been utterly devastated by war and are only now struggling to their feet.

But this is also a story of friendship and remarkable encounters. In the course of his journey, Gimlette meets farmers, war heroes, ancient tribesmen, world-class cricketers, terrorists, a former president, old planters, survivors of great massacres—and perhaps some of their perpetrators. That’s to say nothing of the island’s beguiling fauna: elephants, crocodiles, snakes, storks, and the greatest concentration of leopards on Earth. 
             
Here is a land of extravagant beauty and profound devastation, of ingenuity and catastrophe, possessed of both a volatile past and an uncertain future—a place capable of being at once heavenly and hellish—all brought to vibrant, fascinating life here on the page.

Elephant Complex: Travels in Sri Lanka

A marine archaeologist and a salvager join forces to search for a legendary treasure in this novel that takes readers to the depths of the Caribbean and the heights of passion and suspense—from #1 New York Times bestselling author Nora Roberts.
 
Tate Beaumont has a passion for treasure-hunting. Over the years, she and her father have uncovered many fabulous riches, but one treasure has always eluded them: Angelique’s Curse—a jeweled amulet heavy with history, dark with legend, and tainted with blood. In order to find this precious artifact, the Beaumonts reluctantly form a partnership with salvagers Buck and Matthew Lassiter.
 
As the Beaumonts and Lassiters pool their resources to locate Angelique’s Curse, the Caribbean waters darken with shadowy deceptions and hidden threats. Their partnership is placed in jeopardy when Matthew refuses to share information—including the truth behind his father’s mysterious death. For now, Tate and Matthew continue their uneasy alliance—until danger and desire begin to rise to the surface…

The Reef

After the 1st wave, only darkness remains. After the 2nd, only the lucky escape. And after the 3rd, only the "un"lucky survive. After the 4th wave, only one rule applies: trust no one.

Now, it's the dawn of the 5th wave, and on a lonely stretch of highway, Cassie runs from Them. The beings who only look human, who roam the countryside killing anyone they see. Who have scattered Earth's last survivors. To stay alone is to stay alive, Cassie believes, until she meets Evan Walker. Beguiling and mysterious, Evan Walker may be Cassie's only hope for rescuing her brother-or even saving herself. But Cassie must choose: between trust and despair, between defiance and surrender, between life and death. To give up or to get up.

The 5th Wave (The 5th Wave, #1)

After discovering the travel writings of a Victorian explorer and writer, Cherry Briggs decides to retrace his footsteps across the island of Ceylon—now known as the recently war-torn, tsunami-effected Sri Lanka

"Mr Fernando led me into a dark room that was lined with book-cases and smelled of leather and damp. The polished, concrete floor of the library was covered with white jasmine flowers that had blown through the windows during the storm. He began to select from the shelves a collection of disintegrating books. ‘If you are going to read any of them, it should really be this one,’ he said as he passed me two thick volumes, embossed with gold lettering and spotted with damp. The work was simply called Ceylon and was written by an Irishman named Sir James Emerson Tennent, who had been sent to the island in 1845 by Her Majesty’s Government."

"The Teardrop Island" follows in the footsteps of the eccentric Victorian James Emerson Tennent, along a route which takes Cherry to pilgrimage trails, into tea estates and rural regions inhabited by indigenous tribes, as well as through restricted areas of the former warzone, delving under the surface of the contemporary culture via cricket matches and fortune tellers.

The Teardrop Island: Following Victorian Footsteps Across Sri Lanka

In the world of his large family, affluent Tamils living in Colombo, Arjie is an oddity, a 'funny boy' who prefers dressing as a girl to playing cricket with his brother. 

In FUNNY BOY we follow the life of the family through Arjie's eyes, as he comes to terms both with his own homosexuality and with the racism of the society in which he lives. In the north of Sri Lanka there is a war going on between the army and the Tamil Tigers, and gradually it begins to encroach on the family's comfortable life. Sporadic acts of violence flare into full scale riots and lead, ultimately, to tragedy. 

Written in clear, simple prose, Syam Selvadurai's first novel is masterly in its mingling of the personal and political.

Funny Boy

In the summer of 2009, the leader of the dreaded Tamil Tiger guerrillas was killed, bringing to a bloody end the stubborn and complicated civil war in Sri Lanka. For nearly thirty years, the war's fingers had reached everywhere: into the bustle of Colombo, the Buddhist monasteries scattered across the island, the soft hills of central Sri Lanka, the curves of the eastern coast near Batticaloa and Trincomalee and the stark, hot north. With its genius for brutality, the war left few places and fewer people, untouched.

What happens to the texture of life in a country that endures such bitter conflict? What happens to the country's soul? Samanth Subramanian gives us an extraordinary account of the Sri Lankan war and the lives it changed. Taking us to the ghosts of summers past and to other battles from other times, he draws out the story of Sri Lanka today-an exhausted, disturbed society, still hot from the embers of the war. Through travels and conversations, he examines how people reconcile themselves to violence, how religion and state conspire, how the powerful become cruel and how victory can be put to the task of reshaping memory and burying histories.

"This Divided Island" is a harrowing and humane investigation of a country still inflamed.

This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War

#1 International bestselling novel set in 1920s Ceylon, about a young Englishwoman who marries a charming tea plantation owner and widower, only to discover he's keeping terrible secrets about his past, including what happened to his first wife, that lead to devastating consequences

Nineteen-year-old Gwendolyn Hooper is newly married to a rich and charming widower, eager to join him on his tea plantation, determined to be the perfect wife and mother. But life in Ceylon is not what Gwen expected.

The plantation workers are resentful, the neighbours treacherous, and there are clues to the past - a dusty trunk of dresses, an overgrown gravestone in the grounds - that her husband refuses to discuss.

Just as Gwen finds her feet, disaster strikes. She faces a terrible choice, hiding the truth from almost everyone, but a secret this big can't stay buried forever....

The Tea Planter's Wife

"In this Caldecott Medal winner, Mosquito tells a story that causes a jungle disaster. "Elegance has become the Dillons' hallmark. . . . Matching the art is Aardema's uniquely onomatopoeic text . . . An impressive showpiece."
"-Booklist", starred review.

Winner of Caldecott Medal in 1976 and the Brooklyn Art Books for Children Award in 1977.

Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People's Ears

"The Road From Elephant Pass" won the 2003 Gratiaen Prize for creative writing in English “for its moving story, for its constant feel of real life, for its consistency of narrative momentum, for its descriptive power, for its dramatic use of dialogue to define social context, capture character psychology, and trace the development of a relationship, for its convincing demonstration that resolution of conflict and reconciliation of differences are feasible through mutual experience and regard, and last though not least, for its eminently civilized handling of the last degree of intimacy between a man and a woman.”

The Road From Elephant Pass

For three decades, Sri Lanka’s civil war tore communities apart. In 2009, the Sri Lankan army finally defeated the separatist Tamil Tigers guerrillas in a fierce battle that swept up about 300,000 civilians and killed more than 40,000. More than a million had been displaced by the conflict, and the resilient among them still dared to hope. But the next five years changed everything.

Rohini Mohan’s searing account of three lives caught up in the devastation looks beyond the heroism of wartime survival to reveal the creeping violence of the everyday. When city-bred Sarva is dragged off the streets by state forces, his middle-aged mother, Indra, searches for him through the labyrinthine Sri Lankan bureaucracy. Meanwhile, Mugil, a former child soldier, deserts the Tigers in the thick of war to protect her family.

Having survived, they struggle to live as the Sri Lankan state continues to attack minority Tamils and Muslims, frittering away the era of peace. Sarva flees the country, losing his way – and almost his life – in a bid for asylum. Mugil stays, breaking out of the refugee camp to rebuild her family and an ordinary life in the village she left as a girl. But in her tumultuous world, desires, plans, and people can be snatched away in a moment.

"The Seasons of Trouble "is a startling, brutal, yet beau­tifully written debut from a prize-winning journal­ist. It is a classic piece of reportage, five years in the making, and a trenchant, compassionate examina­tion of the corrosive effect of conflict on a people.

The Seasons of Trouble: Life Amid the Ruins of Sri Lanka's Civil War

The setting is Sri Lanka, 1980, and it is the season of monsoons. Fourteen-year-old Amrith is caught up in the life of the cheerful, well-to-do household in which he is being raised by his vibrant Auntie Bundle and kindly Uncle Lucky. He tries not to think of his life “before,” when his doting mother was still alive. Amrith’s holiday plans seem unpromising: he wants to appear in his school’s production of "Othello" and he is learning to type at Uncle Lucky’s tropical fish business. Then, like an unexpected monsoon, his cousin arrives from Canada and Amrith’s ordered life is storm-tossed. He finds himself falling in love with the Canadian boy. "Othello," with its powerful theme of disastrous jealousy, is the backdrop to the drama in which Amrith finds himself immersed.

Shyam Selvadurai’s brilliant novels, "Funny Boy" and "Cinnamon Gardens," have garnered him international acclaim. In this, his first young adult novel, he explores first love with clarity, humor and compassion.

Swimming in the Monsoon Sea

Armed with a map, a motorcycle, an infectious sense of humor, and a dim understanding of Sri Lanka’s war, author, artist, and adventurer Mark Stephen Meadows arrives in the country intending to have, as it were, afternoon tea with terrorists. Figuring that the first step to solving a problem is understanding it, he journeys north into the war zone, interviewing terrorists, generals, and heroin dealers along the way.
He discovers an island of beauty and abundance ground down by three decades of war. As he travels north through Colombo, Kandy, and the damaged city of Jaffna, Meadows gives his riveting take on the war. Known for child conscription and drawn-out torture methods, he explains, the Tamil Tigers also invented suicide bombing and were the first to lace together terrorists and financiers into international networks of militant uprising.
In Sri Lanka, Meadows discovers a deep view into an ancient culture. Along the way, he learns to trap an elephant, weave rope from coconut husks, and cast out devils, and he actually has tea with a few terrorists. This is the inspiring story of his journey and an enlightening meditation on the interconnectedness of globalization, the media, and modern terrorism.

Tea Time with Terrorists: A Motorcycle Journey into the Heart of Sri Lanka's Civil War

A chronicle of life on the resplendent island, combining the immediacy of memoir with the vividness of travelogue and reportage 
 
Adele Barker and her son, Noah, settled into the central highlands of Sri Lanka for an eighteen-month sojourn, immersing themselves in the customs, cultures, and landscapes of the island—its elephants, birds, and monkeys; its hot curries and sweet mangoes; the cacophony of its markets; the resonant evening chants from its temples. They hear stories of the island’s colorful past and its twenty-five-year civil war between the Sinhalese majority and the Tamil Tigers. When, having returned home to Tucson, Barker awakes on December 26, 2004, to see televised images of the island’s southern shore disappearing into the ocean, she decides she must go back. Traveling from the southernmost coasts to the farthest outposts of the Tamil north, she witnesses the ravages of the tsunami that killed forty-eight thousand Sri Lankans in the space of twenty minutes, and reports from the ground on the triumphs and failures of relief efforts. Combining the immediacy of memoir and the vividness of travelogue with the insight of the best reportage, "Not Quite Paradise" chronicles life in a place few have ever visited.


"From the Trade Paperback edition."

Not Quite Paradise: An American Sojourn in Sri Lanka

"The driver’s job is to stay in control behind the wheel and that is all. The past is what you leave as you go. There is nothing more to it."

Vasantha retired early, bought himself a van with his savings, and now works as a driver for hire. As he drives through Sri Lanka, carrying aid workers, businessmen, and families and meeting lonely soldiers and eager hoteliers, he engages them with self-deprecating wit and folksy wisdom—and reveals for us their uncertain lives.

On his journey from the army camps in northern Jaffna to the moonlit ramparts of Galle, in the south, Vasantha begins to discover the depth of the problems of the past—his own and his country’s—and the promise the future might hold.

From the writer praised by "The Guardian" for the “vivid originality” of his vision, here is a wonderful collection—perceptive, somber, finely tuned—that draws a potent portrait of postwar Sri Lanka and the ghosts of civil war.


Noontide Toll: Stories

A flamboyant beauty who once partied with the Prince of Wales and who now, in her seventh decade, has "gone native" in a Ceylonese jungle. A proud, Oxford-educated lawyer who unwittingly seals his own professional fate when he dares to solve the sensational Hamilton murder case that has rocked the upper echelons of local society. A young woman who retreats from her family and the world after her infant brother is found suffocated in his crib. These are among the linked lives compellingly portrayed in a novel everywhere hailed for its dazzling grace and savage wit -- a spellbinding tale of family and duty, of legacy and identity, a novel that brilliantly probes the ultimate mystery of what makes us who we are.

The Hamilton Case

"An extraordinary book. This dignified, just and unbearable account of the dark heart of Sri Lanka needs to be read by everyone." — Roma Tearne, author of "Mosquito"

The tropical island of Sri Lanka is a paradise for tourists, but in 2009 it became a hell for its Tamil minority, as decades of civil war between the Tamil Tiger guerrillas and the government reached its bloody climax. Caught in the crossfire were hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren, doctors, farmers, fishermen, nuns, and other civilians. And the government ensured through a strict media blackout that the world was unaware of their suffering.

Now, a UN enquiry has called for war crimes investigation, and Frances Harrison, a BBC correspondent for Sri Lanka during the conflict, recounts those crimes for the first time in sobering, shattering detail.

Still Counting the Dead

Ganga, a young girl, grows up carefree in the midst of her loving family in an old and beautiful house nestled in the idyllic hill country of Sri Lanka. Her childhood is like any other—until it isn’t. A cherished friendship is revealed to have monstrous undertones and the consequences of trauma spell out both the end of her childhood and that of her stable home. Ostracized by their community in the wake of one terrible night, Ganga and her mother seek safety by immigrating to America.

In America Ganga must negotiate the challenges and thrills of an American teenage girlhood. She navigates immigrancy and thrives. She fulfills the American dream by graduating from college, moving to San Francisco and working as a nurse, yet beneath the surface the scars of her past continue to haunt her. When she meets Daniel, a handsome, charismatic man and falls deeply in love, it appears that she has found her happily ever after. Instead, the secrets continue to corrode he life until she finally commits one terrible and unforgivable act.

What follows...is her confession.

What Lies Between Us: A Novel

"An incisive first account of the formation, history, and bloody dissolution of the rebel Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka."

"An excellent account . . . scrupulously fair."--"The Economist"

"This shattering, heart-breaking tale of savagery and suffering not only lifts the veil that conceals one of the most awful tragedies of the current era, but also helps us understand what should be done, not just in this sad and beautiful land, but long before other such horrors spiral out of control." --Noam Chomsky, institute professor and professor of linguistics, MIT, and author of "Hopes and Prospects"

In the final days of the thirty-year Sri Lankan civil war, perhaps tens of thousands of civilians were killed as government forces hemmed in the last remaining Tamil Tiger rebels on a tiny sand-spit, dubbed "The Cage." Gordon Weiss, a journalist on the scene as the UN spokesman in Sri Lanka, pulls back the curtain of government misinformation to tell the full story for the first time.

Tracing the role of foreign influence as it converged with a history of radical Buddhism and ethnic conflict, "The Cage "is a harrowing portrait of the root causes and catastrophic consequences of a revolutionary uprising caught in the crossfire of international power jockeying. As Weiss relates the tale of an island paradise torn apart by war, he raises critical questions: Were war crimes committed? Was this the Obama administration's first "human rights failure" (as suggested by "Time" magazine)? Does China's central role in the Sri Lankan government's victory sound a warning for democratic progress?

Gordon Weiss has lived in New York and worked in numerous conflict and natural disaster zones including Bosnia, Afghanistan, Darfur, and Haiti. Employed by the United Nations for over twelve years, he is now a visiting scholar at Sydney University and a correspondent for Australia's "Global Mail."


The Cage: The Fight for Sri Lanka and the Last Days of the Tamil Tigers

In these stories, the acclaimed author of the Reef describes his homeland of Sri Lanka—a kind of paradise in which a sudden moment of silence in a city is cause for fear, where civil war disrupts a marriage thousands of miles away, and where the building up of home, relationships, and lives is more often than not swiftly and violently brought down. A New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

Monkfish Moon

When Inspector Shanti de Silva moves with his English wife Jane to his new post in the sleepy hill town of Nuala he anticipates a more restful life than police work in the big city entails. However an arrogant plantation owner with a lonely wife, a crusading lawyer, and a death in suspicious circumstances present him with a riddle that he will need all his experience to solve. 
Set on the exotic island of Ceylon in the 1930s, Trouble in Nuala is an entertaining and relaxing mystery spiced with humour and a colourful cast of characters. 


Trouble in Nuala (The Inspector de Silva Mysteries #1)

The Buckwater family live side-by-side with their Ceylonese staff in a house nestled in the lush hillside tea estates of '30s Ceylon. Premawathi is their cook and housekeeper. She has two beautiful daughters and a son, Chandi, who even at four-years-old is bright, inventive and more mischievous than his young harried mother can sometimes cope with. As the novel opens Elsie Buckwater, an embittered woman, is giving birth to her third baby. Chandi is enchanted by the idea of making an English friend and he christens her Rose-Lizzie after the flowers he loves. But the discontented Elsie imposes a stifling and unhappy atmosphere on the household and forbids Chandi to go near her baby daughter, whom she herself largely ignores. Eventually however she packs her bags and returns to England. Without her, life at the bungalow flourishes.

The Flower Boy

Two days before Christmas in 1987, at the age of 17, Niromi de Soyza found herself in an ambush as part of a small platoon of militant Tamil Tigers fighting government forces in the bloody civil war that was to engulf Sri Lanka for decades. With her was her lifelong friend, Ajanthi, also aged 17. Leaving behind them their shocked middle-class families, the teenagers had become part of the Tamil Tigers' first female contingent. 

Equipped with little more than a rifle and a cyanide capsule, Niromi's group managed to survive on their wits in the jungle, facing not only the perils of war but starvation, illness, and growing internal tensions among the militant Tigers. And then events erupted in ways that she could no longer bear.

How was it that this well-educated, mixed-race, middle-class girl from a respectable family came to be fighting with the Tamil Tigers? Today she lives in Sydney with her husband and children; but Niromi de Soyza is not your ordinary woman and this is her compelling story.

Tamil Tigress

Some remember his impressive career stats ... others recall his on-field arrogance. Some say he fixed matches . . . others say he was dropped for being Tamil! Who exactly was Pradeep Mathew? And what became of him?

WG Karunasena, a man who spent 64 years drinking arrack and watching cricket decides to find out ...If you have never seen a cricket match; or if you have and it has made you snore ...If you can’t understand why anyone would watch, let alone obsess over this dull game ...... then this IS the book for you

Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew

When rumors of civil war between the ruling Sinhalese and the Tamils in the northern sector of Sri Lanka reach those who live in the south, somehow it seems not to be happening in their own country. At least not until Janaki’s sister, Lakshmi—now a refugee whose husband, a Tamil, has disappeared—comes back to live with her family. And when Sam, an American Peace Corps worker who boards with Janaki’s family, falls in love with one of his students, a young girl from the north, he, too, becomes acutely aware of the dangers that exist for any- one who gets drawn into the conflict, however marginally.

 Skillfully weaving together the stories of these and other intersecting lives, "The Beach at Galle Road" explores themes of memory and identity amid the consequences of the Sri Lankan civil war. From different points of view, across generations and geographies, it pits the destructive power of war against the resilient power of family, individual will, and the act of storytelling itself.

The Beach at Galle Road: Stories from Sri Lanka

A History of Sri Lanka

Leonard Woolf was born in London in 1880 and spent five years at Trinity College, Cambridge where he began lasting friendships with men such as Lytton Strachey, E. M. Forster and John Maynard Keynes. In 1904 Woolf applied to join the home civil service but failed the exam. Instead, he was sent to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) as a cadet in the Ceylon civil service, joining the small group of white administrators who ruled the colony. He remained there for nearly seven years. In "Woolf in Ceylon" Christopher Ondaatje, who was himself born and brought up on the island, follows in the footsteps of Woolf. Drawing on his personal experience of Ceylon and empire, he compares the way of life during imperial days with that of the post-colonial era. We learn as much about the country, its people and their transformation of the country during the past century as we do about the man who used his colonial career to become one of the leading English men of letters of the twentieth century. Ondaatje's sensitive descriptions, illustrated with period and modern photographs, tell the compelling story of Woolf s sojourn in Ceylon and his developing disillusionment with the British colonial system. The result is a unique evocation of both a vanished imperial world and a colonial servant s enduring legacy in the contemporary culture of an enchanted but troubled island.

Woolf in Ceylon: An Imperial Journey in the Shadow of Leonard Woolf, 1904-1911

Growing is the autobiography of a young man sent straight from university to help govern the British Empire. Rarely has an empire had such an intelligent, dutiful, hard-working and incorruptible civil servant. Woolf was determined to do what was good, but discovered for himself that colonial rule was fated to do what was wrong. Growing is a deeply affectionate portrait of the mystery, magic and savage beauty of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) at the beginning of the twentieth century. For Woolf had both the time and the intelligence to explore the country, its diverse religions, beliefs and philosophies, and to pay attention to the differing cultures of the Sinhalese, Tamil and Anglo-Indian communities. He also had the wit to leave a series of devastating portraits of the colonial ruling class.

Growing: Seven Years in Ceylon

The Jam Fruit Tree (The Burgher Trilogy, Book 1)

A tender, evocative novel, in the tradition of "In the Time of the Butterflies" and "The Kite Runner", about the years leading up to the Sri Lankan civil war.

On the day the Herath family moves in, Sal Mal Lane is still a quiet street, disturbed only by the cries of the children whose triumphs and tragedies sustain the families that live there. As the neighbors adapt to the newcomers in different ways, the children fill their days with cricket matches, romantic crushes, and small rivalries. But the tremors of civil war are mounting, and the conflict threatens to engulf them all. 

In a heartrending novel poised between the past and the future, the innocence of the children—a beloved sister and her overprotective siblings, a rejected son and his twin sisters, two very different brothers—contrasts sharply with the petty prejudices of the adults charged with their care. In Ru Freeman’s masterful hands, "On Sal Mal Lane", a story of what was lost to a country and her people, becomes a resounding cry for reconciliation.

On Sal Mal Lane

The story of two women in Sri Lanka, strangers to one another, yet united by an undying love, as they travel towards an unimaginable destiny.

A Disobedient Girl: A Novel

In a time when much of the country sees red whenever the subject of gay marriage comes up, Dan Savage-outspoken author of the column "Savage Love"- makes it personal. 

 Dan Savage's mother wants him to get married. His boyfriend, Terry, says "no thanks" because he doesn't want to act like a straight person. Their six-year-old son DJ says his two dads aren't "allowed" to get married, but that he'd like to come to the reception and eat cake. Throw into the mix Dan's straight siblings, whose varied choices form a microcosm of how Americans are approaching marriage these days, and you get a rollicking family memoir that will have everyone-gay or straight, right or left, single or married-howling with laughter and rethinking their notions of marriage and all it entails. BACKCOVER: "Hilarious, heartfelt."
 -"Seattle Post-Intelligencer" 

 "As funny as David Sedaris's essay collections, but bawdier and more thought-provoking."
 -"Publisher's Weekly" (starred review) 

 "Most of all, a book about creating and appreciating family."
 -"Seattle Times" 

 "I think America would be a better place if everyone on every side of the gay marriage debate would read this book."
 -Ira Glass, host of the public radio show "This American Life" 

 "The strongest argument here, which [Savage] brilliantly plays down, is that family means everything to these people: married, not married, blended, gay, straight, whatever."
 -"The Washington Post"

The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage, and My Family

Faith Harrington is a classic girl of privilege-until her father is convicted for running a Ponzi scheme. Now she's back in her hometown, where she runs into her teenage crush-dark, brooding Ethan Barron, who's no stranger to scandal himself.

Serendipity (Serendipity, #1)

A former international hostage negotiator for the FBI offers a new, field-tested approach to high-stakes negotiations—whether in the boardroom or at home.

After a stint policing the rough streets of Kansas City, Missouri, Chris Voss joined the FBI, where his career as a hostage negotiator brought him face-to-face with a range of criminals, including bank robbers and terrorists. Reaching the pinnacle of his profession, he became the FBI’s lead international kidnapping negotiator. "Never Split the Difference" takes you inside the world of high-stakes negotiations and into Voss’s head, revealing the skills that helped him and his colleagues to succeed where it mattered most: saving lives. In this practical guide, he shares the nine effective principles—counter-intuitive tactics and strategies—you too can use to become more persuasive in both your professional and personal life.

Life is a series of negotiations you should be prepared for: buying a car; negotiating a salary; buying a home; renegotiating rent; deliberating with your partner. Taking emotional intelligence and intuition to the next level, "Never Split the Difference" gives you the competitive edge in any discussion.

Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It

London. On a bright July morning a series of bombs bring the capital to a halt. Simon Swann, a medic from one of the large teaching hospitals, is searching frantically amongst the chaos and the rubble. All around police sirens and ambulances are screaming but Simon does not hear. He is out of breath because he has been running, and he is distraught. But who is he looking for? 

To find out we have first to go back thirty years to a small island in the Indian Ocean where a little girl named Alice Fonseka is learning to ride a bicycle on the beach. The island is Sri Lanka, with its community on the brink of civil war. Alice's life is about to change forever. Soon she will have to leave for England, abandoning her beloved grandfather, and accompanied by her mother, Sita, a woman broken by a series of terrible events.

In London, Alice grows into womanhood. Trapped in a loveless marriage, she has a son. Slowly she fulfills her grandfather's prophecy and becomes an artist. Eventually she finds true love. But London in the twenty first century is a mass of migration and suspicion. The war on terror has begun and everyone, even Simon Swann, middle class, rational, medic that he is, will be caught up in this war in the most unexpected and terrible way.

Brixton Beach

An unmitigated treat for the hundreds of thousands of fans of the first Bazaar.

In The New Railway Bazaar, Theroux recreates an epic journey he took thirty years ago, a giant loop by train (mostly) through Eastern Europe, Turkey, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Indian Subcontinent, China, Japan, and Siberia. In short, he traverses all of Asia top to bottom, and end to end. In the three decades since he first travelled this route, Asia has undergone phenomenal change. The Soviet Union has collapsed, China has risen, India booms, Burma slowly smothers, and Vietnam prospers despite the havoc unleashed upon it the last time Theroux passed through. He witnesses all this and more in a 25,000 mile journey, travelling as the locals do, by train, car, bus, and foot.

His odyssey takes him from Eastern Europe, still hungover from Communism, through tense but thriving Turkey, into the Caucasus, where Georgia limps back toward feudalism while its neighbour Azerbaijan revels in oil-driven capitalism. As he penetrates deeper into Asia’s heart, his encounters take on an otherworldly cast. The two chapters that follow show us Turkmenistan, a profoundly isolated society at the mercy of an almost comically egotistical dictator, and Uzbekistan, a ruthless authoritarian state. From there, he retraces his steps through India, Mayanmar, China, and Japan, providing his penetrating observations on the changes these countries have undergone.

Brilliant, caustic, and totally addictive, The New Railway Bazaar is Theroux at his very best.

Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: On the Tracks of the Great Railway Bazaar

A mesmerising literary novel, "Questions of Travel" charts two very different lives. Laura travels the world before returning to Sydney, where she works for a publisher of travel guides. Ravi dreams of being a tourist until he is driven from Sri Lanka by devastating events.

Around these two superbly drawn characters, a double narrative assembles an enthralling array of people, places and stories - from Theo, whose life plays out in the long shadow of the past, to Hana, an Ethiopian woman determined to reinvent herself in Australia.

Award-winning author Michelle de Kretser illuminates travel, work and modern dreams in this brilliant evocation of the way we live now. Wonderfully written, "Questions of Travel" is an extraordinary work of imagination - a transformative, very funny and intensely moving novel.

Questions of Travel

Consumption has ravaged Louise Pinecroft's family, leaving her and her father alone and heartbroken. But Dr Pinecroft has plans for a revolutionary experiment: convinced that sea air will prove to be the cure his wife and children needed, he arranges to house a group of prisoners suffering from the same disease in the cliffs beneath his new Cornish home. While he devotes himself to his controversial medical trials, Louise finds herself increasingly discomfited by the strange tales her new maid tells of the fairies that hunt the land, searching for those they can steal away to their realm.

Forty years later, Hester Why arrives at Morvoren House to take up a position as nurse to the now partially paralysed and almost entirely mute Miss Pinecroft. Hester has fled to Cornwall to try and escape her past, but surrounded by superstitious staff enacting bizarre rituals, she soon discovers that her new home may be just as dangerous as her last.

Bone China

Two and a half decades into a devastating civil war, Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority is pushed inexorably towards the coast by the advancing army. Amongst the evacuees is Dinesh, whose world has contracted to a makeshift camp where time is measured by the shells that fall around him like clockwork. Alienated from family, home, language, and body, he exists in a state of mute acceptance, numb to the violence around him, till he is approached one morning by an old man who makes an unexpected proposal: that Dinesh marry his daughter, Ganga. Marriage, in this world, is an attempt at safety, like the beached fishing boat under which Dinesh huddles during the bombings. As a couple, they would be less likely to be conscripted to fight for the rebels, and less likely to be abused in the case of an army victory. Thrust into this situation of strange intimacy and dependence, Dinesh and Ganga try to come to terms with everything that has happened, hesitantly attempting to awaken to themselves and to one another before the war closes over them once more.

Anuk Arudpragasam’s "The Story of a Brief Marriage" is a feat of extraordinary sensitivity and imagination, a meditation on the fundamental elements of human existence—eating, sleeping, washing, touching, speaking—that give us direction and purpose, even as the world around us collapses. Set over the course of a single day and night, this unflinching debut confronts marriage and war, life and death, bestowing on its subjects the highest dignity, however briefly.

The Story of a Brief Marriage

Elly Rose and her mother fly from Sydney, Australia to Sri Lanka, to attend the famous Esala Perahera festival, and to meet Shalinka and his daughter Aruni. When a baby elephant is lost, Elly Rose knows she must help find its family. It's a race against time. What will they do when a cheeky monkey steals their map? Will they find the elephants family or will they get caught in the monsoon rains?

An educational book about culture, friendship and being selfless. This book embraces travel and adventure and explores different cultures and traditions in Sri Lanka. An Australian and a Sri Lankan girl go on an adventure together to find the baby elephants family. Together they learn a little more about each other and their different cultures.

The beautiful vibrant watercolour illustrations take the reader on a journey of mystery, combining both real photos and watercolours to create the unmistakable style that Maggie O'Hara brings to the Elly Rose series of travel books.

Elly Rose in Sri Lanka


  From the bestselling author of "The Moonlit Garden" comes the sweeping, romantic tale of one woman’s quest across two continents and one hundred years of history to unearth her family’s deepest secret.
Diana Wagenbach is the sole survivor in a withering family tree fraught with secrets. When the first in a trail of clues is handed down to Diana by her great-aunt on her deathbed, along with a plea to assuage their family’s guilt by revealing all, Diana obliges. She follows the clues—a picture here, a letter there, a pressed frangipani flower in a book—that carry her away from her philandering husband in Berlin to a charming manor in England and all the way to a tea plantation in Sri Lanka.Diana unravels the dramatic tale of her great-great-grandmother, Grace Tremayne, with the aid of Jonathan Singh, a local historian and writer—and someone with whom she feels a deep bond that sparks into romance. As Grace’s tragic past in exotic colonial Ceylon is revealed and the family’s sins come to light, Diana finds inspiration in her ancestor’s courage and begins to rethink what happiness—and love—is worth, and how the surest route to peace is in setting the truth free.

Butterfly Island

When a rusty cargo ship carrying Mahindan and five hundred fellow refugees from Sri Lanka's bloody civil war reaches Vancouver's shores, the young father thinks he and his six-year-old son can finally start a new life. Instead, the group is thrown into a detention processing center, with government officials and news headlines speculating that among the "boat people" are members of a separatist militant organization responsible for countless suicide attacks—and that these terrorists now pose a threat to Canada's national security. As the refugees become subject to heavy interrogation, Mahindan begins to fear that a desperate act taken in Sri Lanka to fund their escape may now jeopardize his and his son's chance for asylum.

 Told through the alternating perspectives of Mahindan; his lawyer, Priya, a second-generation Sri Lankan Canadian who reluctantly represents the refugees; and Grace, a third-generation Japanese Canadian adjudicator who must decide Mahindan's fate as evidence mounts against him, The Boat People is a spellbinding and timely novel that provokes a deeply compassionate lens through which to view the current refugee crisis.

The Boat People

The Sweet and Simple Kind is an engrossing and dramatic family saga set against the backdrop of Ceylon’s turbulent evolution into Sri Lanka. Resonant in its social insights and beautifully written, The Sweet and Simple Kind offers a richly imagined world of love, political chicanery and family turmoil in the newly independent Sri Lanka of the 1950s and 60s. As an intensely political family attempts to balance language with religion, and privilege with equity, two smart, westernised young women — cousins Tsunami and Latha — pursue their own personal freedoms. The Sweet and Simple Kind enchants us with its combination of authenticity, humour and passion.

Sri Lanka

Island of a Thousand Mirrors

Nayomi Munaweera

Anil's Ghost

Michael Ondaatje

Les Jardins de cannelle

Shyam Selvadurai

The Village in the Jungle

Leonard Woolf

Running in the Family

Michael Ondaatje

Elephant Complex: Travels in Sri Lanka

John Gimlette

The Reef

Nora Roberts

The 5th Wave (The 5th Wave, #1)

Rick Yancey

The Teardrop Island: Following Victorian Footsteps Across Sri Lanka

Cherry Briggs

Funny Boy

Shyam Selvadurai

This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War

Samanth Subramanian

The Tea Planter's Wife

Dinah Jefferies

Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People's Ears

Verna Aardema

The Road From Elephant Pass

Nihal de Silva

The Seasons of Trouble: Life Amid the Ruins of Sri Lanka's Civil War

Rohini Mohan

Swimming in the Monsoon Sea

Shyam Selvadurai

Tea Time with Terrorists: A Motorcycle Journey into the Heart of Sri Lanka's Civil War

Mark Stephen Meadows

Not Quite Paradise: An American Sojourn in Sri Lanka

Adele Marie Barker

Noontide Toll: Stories

Romesh Gunesekera

The Hamilton Case

Michelle de Kretser

Still Counting the Dead

Frances Harrison

What Lies Between Us: A Novel

Nayomi Munaweera

The Cage: The Fight for Sri Lanka and the Last Days of the Tamil Tigers

Gordon Weiss

Monkfish Moon

Romesh Gunesekera

Trouble in Nuala (The Inspector de Silva Mysteries #1)

Harriet Steel

The Flower Boy

Karen Roberts

Tamil Tigress

Niromi de Soyza

Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew

Shehan Karunatilaka

The Beach at Galle Road: Stories from Sri Lanka

Joanna Luloff

A History of Sri Lanka

K.M. De Silva

Woolf in Ceylon: An Imperial Journey in the Shadow of Leonard Woolf, 1904-1911

Christopher Ondaatje

Growing: Seven Years in Ceylon

Leonard Woolf

The Jam Fruit Tree (The Burgher Trilogy, Book 1)

Carl Muller

On Sal Mal Lane

Ru Freeman

A Disobedient Girl: A Novel

Ru Freeman

This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War

Samanth Subramanian

The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage, and My Family

Dan Savage

Serendipity (Serendipity, #1)

Carly Phillips

Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It

Chris Voss

Brixton Beach