My Favourite Book This Year

I don’t think I’ve ever put a book down so often, simply because I didn’t want it to end. Not so much for the reason that you finally found a book to maintain your interest, one that you couldn’t wait to return to, that kept you turning the page time and time again. Though this book very much was that and more, I didn’t want it to end simply because finishing it meant stepping outside the realms of fiction back into a world where, the reality of it was, is that every word that made up the story was real.

I visited beautiful Sri Lanka not so long ago and held between many hands on the beach I saw this book pull readers into the reality of the land we were walking on and show us the history that we couldn’t quite see in front of us. At the time I was none the wiser, blissfully enjoying my morning walks to yoga, daily coconuts on the beach and sunset swim in the ocean with a very hazy, actually embarrassingly limited, understanding of the history of this country with a very long and sad story behind it. I arrived home with every intention to learn more and it just so happened that my friend Lottie bought me this book for my birthday and handed it to me days after I returned.

Now, one of the hubs of surfing in the Eastern world, dense green jungle dominates the landscape or Sri Lanka, it feels as though yoga shalas almost outnumber humans. The story that V. Ganeshananthan shares with her reader of her youth as a young Tamil woman growing up in a minority community and the beginnings of a civil war is something you wish had only been written and not lived. A brief history; Sri Lanka was divided between two communities, the Tamils and the Sinhalese. Both geographically, by language and religion these two groups of people led very separate existences. British occupation favoured Tamil people due to their presence in other colonised countries though the Sinhalese community made up the majority of the population. Once colonisation came to an end in 1948 the country was left destabilised and a power struggle between both communities became a characterising motive for the events that followed and extended almost three decades.

The undoing of community, of family and friendships, the unrecognisable new identities of those closest though they somehow still felt like home, the inner battle to do good whilst somewhat sitting on the same side as the perpetrator encapsulates the complexities, parallels and juxtapositions of a war between its own. The narrator walks the reader through her footsteps, thought processes and calls the reader into her questions on several occasions, creating several intersections in the novel where we are requested to connect with our own lived experience “perhaps your library, too, went up in smoke” calling us to reflect on our own collective humanity.

There is a moment where a dog cries out at distant sound, one that couldn’t be heard by the people, and I realised that this is exactly why I didn’t want this book to end. Because for the book to end meant that I couldn’t read about the tales of our narrator Sashi anymore, I’d only be left with the reality that this did in fact happen, even if I couldn’t see or hear it myself.