Island of Stories

Lonely Planet (c) 2024

A selection of strange, funny, heartbreaking, thrilling, mind-altering books to read while visiting Sri Lanka.

In recent years, Sri Lankan literature has punched above its weight, much in the way the island’s cricketers once used to. The 2020s have seen Sri Lankan authors win The Women’s Prize for Fiction, The Nebula Award, The Booker Prize, The Miles Franklin Award, and The Commonwealth Short Story Prize.

Perhaps not surprising, considering the island’s chronicled history of two millennia, its colonial legacy spanning five centuries and three colonizers, and a dramatic, action-packed post-independence featuring a 30-year civil war, two Marxist uprisings, a tsunami, an economic collapse, a people’s revolution and two Cricket World Cups.

The country is a mix of ethnicities, faiths, narratives and landscapes.  There’s no shortage of tall stories or colourful characters on this beautiful troubled isle. And many Sri Lankans seem to be natural storytellers. Every grinning Tuk-tuk driver, beaming Aunty behind counter or Uncle propped up at beach bar will have a joke, an anecdote, or a conspiracy theory to share.

But once done with the sights and the chats, travellers may wish to dig deeper, to unpack this destination’s curiousities and contradictions, to unravel its magic and make sense of its mayhem. Here are a few books that offer a glimpse of Sri Lanka’s soul, that scratch beneath the surface to uncover its beating heart.

First, the disclaimers. This selection is restricted to English-language books. The literatures of Sinhala and Tamil are rich and varied, though not yet as accessible to visitors as they could be. With local publishers growing, talented translators emerging and regional reading appetites expanding, this may well change.

Below is not a definitive catalogue of the greatest Sri Lankan books of all time, though many titles here would certainly make that list. These are books for first-time visitors and inquisitive travellers, pathways towards a deeper dialogue with Sri Lanka and its many faces.

Start with the travelogues. More than a few tourists have been enthralled enough to extend their stays, and inspired enough to chronicle their experiences. Some of these accounts are insightful and engaging, while many venture towards obvious cliches. From this crowded pile, two nuanced, well-researched books stand out.  Upon a Sleepless Isle by Andrew Fidel Fernando and Elephant Complex by John Gimlette, are both entertaining travel companions, skillfully balancing irony with observation. Taken together, they provide a rich overview, from both an insider and an outsider, of Sri Lanka’s many comedies, tragedies and absurdities.

For Sri Lankan English fiction, its best to start with the classics. Running in the Family by godfather of Lankan anglophone writing Michael Ondaatje and naughty-old-man-of-letters Carl Muller’s influential The Jam Fruit Tree, are two vastly different family sagas that capture the vibrancy and hilarity of post-independence Ceylon. Ondaatje’s understated wit is a contrast to Muller’s bawdy humour, though both capture essential truths of Ceylonese society.

Reef by Romesh Gunasekera with its lush descriptions of food, nature and love and Funny Boy by Shyam Selvadurai, an LGBTQ bildungsroman set against the 83 riots, have inspired generations of Sri Lankan storytellers within the country and across the diaspora.

Mother Lanka boasts as many tales as she does landscapes, flavours, textures and moods. Here are a few books that might work best in selected settings.

If in the hill country surrounded by teafields and mist, try The Hamilton Case by Michelle de Kretzer or The Tea Planter’s Wife by Dinah Jeffries and immerse in the mystery, romance and glamour of Ceylon’s plantations under the British Raj. If you’ve been dazzled by the ancient cities of Anuradhapura, Polonnaruwa and Sigiriya, Colin de Silva’s blockbuster historical novel series that began with The Winds of Sinhala will fill the gaps in the history books with action, conquest and intrigue.

It’s hard to know what qualifies as a beach read these days, but two millennial genre-fiction writers have produced page turners for in between swims. Amanda Jayatissa’s You’re Invited is a twisty thriller set at a big fat Sri Lankan wedding on the beach, while Yudhanjaya Wijeratne’s An Inhuman Race imagines an alternative Ceylon in the age of AI, groaning under the yoke of empire.

Should you prefer your books to be sunny, funny and less dystopic, Colpetty People by the prolific Ashok Ferrey, is a hilarious collection of Colombo society stories, while Lal Medawattegedara’s Playing Pillow Politics at the MGK is a black comedy about faith, science and a great fire mountain.

The story that continues to dominate Sri Lankan conversations is cricket. If you’d like to geek out on Sri Lanka’s favourite obsession, An Island’s Eleven by Nicholas Brookes is a witty and enlightening read, though at 800 pages, perhaps not backpacker friendly. Chinaman by Shehan Karunatilaka is a fictionalized chronicle of a genius cricketer aimed at those who know nothing of the sport. Though this seems like a cheap marketing ploy from an author who would slip his own book into a Lonely Planet article.

Of course, the big story that occupied the island’s headlines and preoccupied its literature was the civil war. There are libraries of non-fiction on the many battles of the 80s, 90s and 00s. Among the finest and most accessible are This Divided Island by Samanth Subramanium and Only Man is Vile by William McGowan. Both are humane, shocking, written with flair and provide thoughtful perspectives on the island’s many conflicts.

Of fictions inspired by the war, there are white-knuckle thrillers like the romance-against-time of The Road From Elephant Pass by Nihal de Silva and the kinetic military potboiler A Cause Untrue by David Blacker. Towards the more literary end of the shelf are Michael Ondaatje’s visceral Anil’s Ghost, Nayomi Munaweera’s lyrical Island of a Thousand Mirrors, Anuk Arudpragasam’s philosophical A Passage North and Roshi Fernando’s bittersweet Homesick. These beautiful and melancholy stories tell of Sri Lankans returning during the war and grappling with tragedy, epiphany and a strange sense of home.

Sonali Deraniyagala’s Wave may well be the worst choice for a beach read, though it is an essential book on humanity, loss and love. The 2004 Asian tsunami produced many tales of courage and heroism, though few as heart-wrenching and as life-affirming as this one.

And then we come to the award-winners. Brotherless Night by VV Ganashanathan, (Women’s Prize 2024) tells the story of a Jaffna family pushed by war towards impossible dilemmas and terrible sacrifices. Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens by Shankari Chandran (Miles Franklin 2023) transports the trauma of the civil war and the burden of racial injustice to a suburban Sydney nursing home. While Vajra Chandrasena’s The Saint of Bright Doors (Nebula 2024) brilliantly uses Sri Lankan mythology and folklore to imagine spectacular worlds and explore unsettling ideas.

Sri Lanka’s most famous visitor turned resident was science fiction hall-of-famer Sir Arthur C Clarke, who lived on these haunted shores for the last five decades of his life. One of his many masterworks, The Fountains of Paradise imagines a space elevator on a holy rock inspired by the iconic Sigiriya rock fortress. Among the many inspired by Clarke’s strange worlds was the 2022 Booker Prize winner The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, a ghost story about a dead war photographer solving his own murder, authored by a shameless self-promoter.

Sir Arthur, who wrote most of his visionary works including 2001: A Space Odyssey at his residence in Colombo, was a passionate scuba diver who once discovered an underwater temple off the coast of Trincomalee. He celebrates the beauty and magic of his adopted homeland in diving memoir The Reefs of Taprobane, and in his evocative preface to The Handbook for the Ceylon Traveller, a classic guidebook from a gentler time. Here the great man reveals why he chose Lanka as the place from which to view the stars.

“The island of Ceylon is a small universe… if you are interested in people, history, nature and art - all the things that really matter – you may find, as I have, that a lifetime is not enough.”

While the island has inspired poetry from the likes of Pablo Neruda, Paul Bowles and assorted Instagrammers, contemporary collections like Vivamarie Vanderpoorten’s Nothing Prepares You, and Malinda Seneviratne’s Edges and classics like Michael Ondaatje’s The Cinnamon Peeler, and Jean Arasanayagam’s The Life of a Poet pair well with a king coconut or arrack cocktail in a Bawa-esque garden at sunset.

For word nerds, wishing to understand the beguiling way in which Sri Lankan speak and write English, Michael Meyler’s The Dictionary of Sri Lankan English, is a labour of scholarship, lexography and love which unearths some delightful quirks of Lankans and Lankanisms.

For history buffs, there is A History of Sri Lanka by KM de Silva, which compresses 2000 years into half as many pages. For those who prefer their history with a slice of myth and romance, Ameena Hussein’s Ibn Batuta in Sri Lanka and Sunela Jayawardena’s The Line of Lanka provide enthralling insights into our distant past and the many adventurers seduced by the isle formerly known as Serendib, Taprobane and Ceylon.

For now, let us end with an apology, as this list excludes as much as it highlights. May it serve as a gentle first step on a journey through the Lanka’s many inner worlds.

And let us save the very best for last. A collection of short stories set right after the end of a 30-year war, Noon Tide Toll by Romesh Gunasekera follows a van driver transporting priests, activists, criminals, entrepreneurs, soldiers, film-makers and terrorists to the post-war north.

Its many snapshots of an island in transition, capture light with shade, hope with hurt, beauty with ruin, and provide no easy answers for these rarely exist. It’s thought-provoking, prescient and wise, and in many ways a perfect fictional travelogue.

So happy travels and pleasant trails to all of Sri Lanka’s travellers, readers and discoverers. May you explore its forests and walk its stories. May you lounge its beaches and get lost in its pages.

Shehan Karunatilaka is a writer, traveller, ad man and bass player. His short story collection The Birth Lottery and children’s books at www.papaya-books.com  are the only works he has failed to plug in this article. Until now. www.shehanwriter.com