Genre: Nonfiction
Length: 240 pages
Audiobook Length: 5 hours and 24 minutes
First Published: 2013
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Publisher’s Description
On the morning of December 26, 2004, on the southern coast of Sri Lanka, Sonali Deraniyagala lost her parents, her husband, and her two young sons in the tsunami she miraculously survived. In this brave and searingly frank memoir, she describes those first horrifying moments and her long journey since. She has written an engrossing, unsentimental, beautifully poised account: as she struggles through the first months following the tragedy, furiously clenched against a reality that she cannot face and cannot deny; and then, over the ensuing years, as she emerges reluctantly, slowly allowing her memory to take her back through the rich and joyous life she’s mourning, from her family’s home in London, to the birth of her children, to the year she met her English husband at Cambridge, to her childhood in Colombo; all the while learning the difficult balance between the almost unbearable reminders of her loss and the need to keep her family, somehow, still alive within her.
Quotes from Wave
I am in the unthinkable situation that people cannot bear to contemplate.
Seven years on, and their absence has expanded. Just as our life would have in this time, it has swelled.
How hideous, that there should be a pecking order in my grief.
About Sonali Deraniyagala
Sonali Deraniyagala teaches in the Department of Economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She is the author of the memoir Wave.
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