symbol marks titles that are particularly recommended.Contemporary Sri Lanka has a rich literary tradition, and the island has produced a string of fine novelists in recent years, including Booker Prize-winner Michael Ondaatje. Although virtually all of them now live abroad, the island, its culture and twentieth-century history continue to loom large in their work – all the novels of Shyam Selvadurai and Romesh Gunesekera, for instance, deal with Sri Lankan themes, even though Gunesekera now lives in London and Selvadurai in Canada.
In the selection of books below, only small-press publishers outside the US or UK are named. The symbol marks titles that are particularly recommended.
Ashok Ferrey Colpetty People. Whimsical, crisply written and enjoyably wry collection of short stories by one of modern Sri Lanka’s most entertaining writers. His other books, including The Good Little Ceylonese Girl and Love in the Tsunami, cover similar ground, offering a satirical, enjoyably subversive look at the social quirks and absurdities of Sri Lankan life.
Romesh Gunesekera Reef, a deceptively simple but haunting story about a house boy, his master and their twin obsessions – cooking and marine science – beautifully captures the flavour of the island, as well as plumbing some surprising depths. The same author’s Noontide Toll is also worth a read for its understated portrait of the island in the aftermath of the civil war.
Shehan Karunatilaka Chinaman. Possibly the best novel ever to come out of Sri Lanka, Karunatilaka’s 2012 debut follows an alcoholic sportswriter’s attempts to hunt down the mysterious spin bowler Pradeep S. Mathew via a gloriously madcap narrative replete with googlies, arrack, corrupt officials, match-fixers, a six-fingered coach and enough cricketing lore to fill a small encyclopedia – at once a wildly entertaining black comedy, a memorable snapshot of Colombo in the raw and a strangely moving portrait of failed ambition and wrecked talent.
Michelle de Kretser The Hamilton Case. Set in the years just before and after independence, this beautifully written and cunningly plotted novel – part period piece, part elegant whodunnit – chronicles the career of lawyer Sam Obeysekere, a loyal subject of the Empire, whose life and loyalties are blighted by his chance involvement in the mysterious murder of a British tea planter.
Carl Muller The prolific novelist and journalist Muller is something of a cultural institution in Sri Lanka. His most famous work, The Jam Fruit Tree trilogy (The Jam Fruit Tree, Yakada Yaka and Once Upon a Tender Time), is an intermittently entertaining account of the lives, loves and interminable misadventures of the von Bloss clan, a family of ruffianly, party-loving and permanently inebriated Burghers. Other books include the comic short stories of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Cemetery; the chunky historical epics The Children of the Lion (based on the mythological history of early Sri Lanka) and Colombo; and a collection of essays, Firing At Random.
Shyam Selvadurai Funny Boy and Cinnamon Gardens. Funny Boy presents a moving and disquieting picture of Sri Lanka seen through the eyes of a gay Tamil boy growing up in Colombo in the years leading up to the civil war. Cinnamon Gardens offers a similarly simple but eloquent account of those trapped by dint of their sex or sexuality in the stiflingly conservative society of 1930s Colombo.
Shyam Selvadurai (editor). Many Roads Through Paradise: An Anthology of Sri Lankan Literature. Absorbing anthology of Sri Lankan writers, featuring prose and poetry from both Sinhalese and Tamil writers from the 1950s through to the present day.
A. Sivanandan When Memory Dies. Weighty historical epic describing the travails of three generations of a Sri Lankan family living through the end of the colonial period and the island’s descent into civil war. The same author’s Where The Dance Is comprises a sequence of inventive and keenly observed short stories set in Sri Lanka, India and England.
Leonard Woolf The Village in the Jungle. Future luminary of the Bloomsbury set, Leonard Woolf served for several years as a colonial administrator in the backwaters of Hambantota. First published in 1913, this gloomy little masterpiece tells a starkly depressing tale of love and murder in an isolated Sri Lankan village, stifled by the encroaching jungle and by its own poverty and backwardness.
Juliet Coombe and Daisy Perry Around the Fort in 80 Lives (Sri Serendipity Publishing, Sri Lanka). Warm, evocative and beautifully illustrated portrait of today’s Galle Fort, told in a series of affectionate sketches of its diverse cast of idiosyncratic characters, from street peddlers to millionaire expats.
Sonali Deraniyagala Wave: A Memoir of Life After the Tsunami. Written by a tsunami survivor who lost her husband, parents and two children in the disaster, this courageously understated and brutally honest memoir is probably the nearest any of us will get to understanding the unimaginable grief of those who lost their entire families to the wave. Harrowing but essential reading.
Christopher Ondaatje The Man-Eater of Punanai. Famous Sri Lankan expatriate Christopher Ondaatje returns to the island of his birth to search for leopards in the war-torn east, and for memories of his own youth – including the spectre of his maverick father, who also appears as one of the stars of Running in the Family.
John Gimlette Elephant Complex. An outstanding recent addition to the tiny number of really good Sri Lankan travel books, featuring encounters with an eclectic cast of characters ranging from Veddahs and farmers through to test cricketers and a former president, all illuminated by Gimlette’s laser-sharp perceptions and consummate mastery of recondite facts.
William McGowan Only Man Is Vile. Written in the late 1980s, this classic account of the civil war and JVP insurrection combines war reportage, travelogue and social commentary to produce a stark, compelling and extremely depressing insight into the darker aspects of the Sinhalese psyche.
Michael Ondaatje Running in the Family. Perhaps the best book ever written about the island, this marvellous memoir of Ondaatje’s Burgher family and his variously dipsomaniac and wildly eccentric relations is at once magically atmospheric and wonderfully comic. Ondaatje’s other Sri Lankan book, the altogether more sombre Anil’s Ghost, offers a very lightly fictionalized account of the civil war and JVP insurrection seen through the eyes of a young forensic pathologist attempting to expose government-sponsored killings.
Yasmine and Brendan Gooneratne This Inscrutable Englishman: Sir John D’Oyly (1774–1824). Detailed biography of the brilliant English diplomat who brokered the surrender of the Kandyan kingdom to the British in 1815 – the sheer drama of the events described makes it an interesting read, despite the authors’ laboriously academic tone.
John Clifford Holt (ed) The Sri Lanka Reader: History, Culture, Politics. This weighty but fascinating volume offers an absorbing overview of the island’s history and culture, anthologizing a vast selection of texts ranging from the Mahavamsa and Sigiriya graffiti through to colonial-era documents and contemporary newspaper articles (including the moving “And Then They Came for Me” by murdered journalist Lasantha Wickrematunga) – all threaded together by the editor.
H.A.J. Hulugalle Ceylon of the Early Travellers (Arjuna Hulugalle, Sri Lanka). This tiny book offers a series of entertaining snapshots of Sri Lankan history seen through the eyes of foreign travellers, traders and soldiers, including accounts of some of the more bizarre incidents in the island’s past, such as the British plan to capture Colombo using a giant cheese.
Robert Knox An Historical Relation of Ceylon (Tisara Prakasakayo, Sri Lanka). Knox’s account of his near twenty-year captivity in the Kandyan kingdom is an interesting read, especially the autobiographical section, which deals with his own Job-like trials and tribulations and culminates in the nail-biting story of his carefully planned escape.
Dennis B. McGilvray Crucible of Conflict, Tamil and Muslim Society on the East Coast of Sri Lanka. Detailed ethnographic study – academic, but absorbing – of eastern Sri Lanka, centred on the town of Akkaraipattu and offering unrivalled insights into the region’s cultural and religious complexities.
Roy Moxham Tea: Addiction, Exploitation and Empire. This detailed and readable account of the development of the tea industry in the British colonies paints a compelling portrait of Victorian enterprise and greed – and of the terrible human price paid by Indian plantation workers. Includes extensive coverage of Sri Lanka.
K.M. de Silva A History of Sri Lanka (Vikas, India). The definitive history of the island, offering a considered and intelligent overview of events from prehistory to the late twentieth century.
Nath Yogasundram A Comprehensive History of Sri Lanka: From Prehistory to Tsunami (Vijitha Yapa, Sri Lanka). Less scholarly than de Silva’s History (see above), though intelligently written, and also more up to date, with coverage up to 2006.
Nira Wickramasinghe Sri Lanka in the Modern Age: A History. Styling itself as a history of the people rather than a history of the state, politics and power, Wickramasinghe’s books travels from colonial times through to the modern postwar era, with many interesting and entertainingly quirky insights en route. It’s also the most up-to-date history currently available, covering events right up to 2013.
Ajith Boyagoda and Sunila Galappatti A Long Watch: War, Captivity and Return in Sri Lanka. Eloquent account by former naval office Ajith Boyagoda of his eight years as a captive of the LTTE – and one which bravely challenges many Sinhalese prejudices and preconceptions about the hated Tigers.
Frances Harrison Still Counting the Dead: Survivors of Sri Lanka’s Hidden War. Written by a former BBC Sri Lanka correspondent, Still Counting the Dead recounts the horrific stories of those caught up in the brutal final months of the civil war, including first-hand accounts of life – or, more usually, death – inside the infamous “no-fire” zone. A damning record of the many brutal atrocities committed by the Sri Lankan government under Mahinda Rajapakse – and for which it has still to be brought to account.
M.R. Narayan Swamy Inside An Elusive Mind: Prabhakaran (Vijitha Yapa, Sri Lanka). Detailed account of the career of the LTTE supremo, covering events up until the turn of the millennium, although many of the LTTE’s less savoury activities – such as their numerous massacres of civilians, political assassinations, the use of child soldiers and the widespread terrorizing of their own people – are conveniently ignored or whitewashed. The same author’s Tigers of Lanka covers very similar ground (although again only up to the turn of the millennium) while the more recent The Tiger Vanquished: LTTE’s Story completes the story.
Anita Pratap Island of Blood: Frontline Reports from Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and other South Asian Flashpoints (Vijitha Yapa, Sri Lanka). Vivid, if sometimes irritatingly self-congratulatory, eyewitness accounts of various Asian flashpoints by a well-known Indian journalist, including extended coverage of the Sri Lankan civil war.
K.M. de Silva Reaping the Whirlwind: Ethnic Conflict, Ethnic Politics in Sri Lanka. Definitive exploration of the social and political roots of the island’s Tamil–Sinhalese conflict. Excellent on the decades preceding the war, although with relatively little coverage of the war itself.
Nirupama Subramanian Sri Lanka: Voices from a War Zone (Vijitha Yapa, Sri Lanka). Published in 2005, this eloquent collection of essays by an Indian Tamil journalist gives a powerful account of the later stages of the civil war, combining military and political analysis of the conflict with the personal stories of those affected by the fighting on both sides of the ethnic divide.
Gordon Weiss The Cage: the Fight for Sri Lanka and the Last Days of the Tamil Tigers. Written by a former UN staffer in Colombo, this searing book offers a meticulously documented account of the last months of the civil war and its aftermath, serving up a grim indictment of both government and LTTE military as well as a scorching critique of Rajapakse family rule. The preliminary history expertly unravels the origins of the conflict, while the eyewitness accounts and reconstructions of battlefield events – and the horrific sufferings of Tamil civilians trapped in the fighting – are unlikely to be bettered.
Emma Boyle Culture Smart! Sri Lanka: A Quick Guide to Customs and Culture. Insightful look at Sri Lankan society, customs and cultural quirks by a seasoned UK expat.
Ronald Lewcock, Barbara Sansoni and Laki Senanayake The Architecture of an Island: the Living Heritage of Sri Lanka. This gorgeous book, a work of art in itself, offers revealing insights into the jumble of influences that have gone into creating Sri Lanka’s distinctive architectural style. The text discusses 95 examples of traditional island architecture – from palm shacks and hen coops to Kandyan temples and colonial cathedrals, all beautifully illustrated with line drawings by Barbara Sansoni.
David Robson Geoffrey Bawa: The Complete Works. Written by a long-term Bawa associate, this comprehensive volume offers the definitive overview of the work of Sri Lanka’s outstanding modern architect, with copious beautiful photographs and fascinating text on Bawa’s life and creations, plus many revealing insights into Sri Lankan culture and art.
Indraneil Das and Anslem de Silva Snakes and Other Reptiles of Sri Lanka. Excellent photographic pocket guide to Sri Lanka’s fascinating but little-known population of lizards, snakes and other slithery creatures.
John Harrison and Tim Worfolk A Field Guide to the Birds of Sri Lanka. The definitive guide to Sri Lanka’s avifauna.
Gehan de Silva Wijeyeratne Naturalist’s Guide to the Birds of Sri Lanka. Invaluable, lightweight starter guide, with excellent photos and clear descriptions of all species.
Gehan de Silva Wijeyeratne Sri Lankan Wildlife: A Visitor’s Guide. Excellent introductory primer covering the full range of island wildlife, from elephants, leopards and birds through to dragonflies, lizards and whales.