Books

Shortlisted for the Gratiaen Prize in 2005; Long listed for the Dublin Impac Prize in 2010

Do you remember when you first fell in love? Do you remember the unrestrained joys and plummeting sorrows of adolescence? Do you remember the confrontation that each new day brought? Enter Kala's life. This sensitive novel about first love and heart break is a complex bitter sweet coming of age story that looks at the modern urban Sri Lankan youth in a new and fresh way. Shehani Gomes navigates us through the perilous and uncharted waters of the young adult, in her exceptionally perceptive debut novel that takes an honest look at a young woman's challenges and triumphs in life.

'If all this outpouring of her creativity found form in a first novel, one hopes for more writing in print from Shehani' – Lakmali Gunwardana

'The book is honest and alive, and its voice, Gomes's voice, is as confident as any young female writer I have read recently...Learning to Fly is more than brave in its formal experimentation. But its strange and, sometimes, difficult structure is not simply an exercise in avant-garde literary practice, but a form that allows the content, the messiness of the protagonist's struggle, to become themselves amidst death and conflict and discrimination, to mirror the novel's setting's own troubled journey towards selfhood' – Vincent Poturica

'Definitely not your average adolescent love story. Shehani Gomes' debut novel- Learning to Fly, having been nominated for the Gratiaen Award of 2005, takes a look into the darker, less explored aspect of adolescence and first love...Shehani's unique writing style complements the way in which characters have been brought to life...She not only grips the reader but makes the reader think, analyze, re-read and analyze again, making her debut novel a very stimulating read- one which brings us to hope for more from her in the very near future' – Tahnee Hopman

Winner of the Gratiaen Prize in 2010

Mythil thinks he is in for a boring time at Archchi's big old house but then things begin to happen. Who lives in the deep jungle and are they friends or foes? How can he make his parents believe the mysterious things that keep happening to him? And how can a young boy like him outwit a clever and sinister enemy on his own?
Mythil's Secret is a story about a young boy's discover of just how strong the bonds of family and friendship can be. Join him on this spine-tingling adventure as he learns to look within himself for courage he never knew he had.

Rambukwella has got into the imaginative mind of a pre-teenage boy and has given a wonderful story for children with a lot of local flavour. The book is certainly a page turner for the adventurous young – Elmo Jayawardene

Mythil's Secret is proof that there can be such a genre as Sri Lankan Fantasy Fiction. It's the sort of book you can read to your kids at night and find yourself equally arrested as they are whilst the story unfolds – Leisure Times

Mythil's Secret is that rare thing in children's fiction—a work that discusses both adult and children's issues equally well...Yet what takes Mythil's Secret beyond much children's literature, and where it really succeeds, is in its willingness to address the strengths, weaknesses and responsibilities of grown-ups, too, especially in relation to kids – CHA, An Asian Literary Journal.

 Approved by the Ministry of Education

Louis M and Kiran are crazy about cricket!

One weekend, practice brings an unexpected invitation to join a cricket match with the big boys. Louis is determined to make a good impression but will he drop a catch? Will Kiran be better than him? And will Louis ruin his chances in cricket forever? NOT IF HE CAN HELP IT!

A practical and concise guide to discover and explore nearly 80 fascinating sites.

For each site an English, Tamil and Sinhala name to help when asking for directions. A drawing, a brief description, directions tor each it, a GPS position for a precise location and a map to help you get there.

A practical and concise guide to discover and explore nearly sixty-six fascinating sites.

For each site we have given an English, Sinhala and Tamil name to help when asking for directions, a drawing, a brief description, directions to reach it, a GPS position for a precise location, and a map to help you to get there.

A practical and consice guide to discover and explore nearly seventy fascinating sites.

For each site we have given an English, Sinhala and Tamil name to help when asking for directions, a drawing, a brief description, directions to reach it, a GPS position for a precise location, and a map to help you to get there.

To Dambulla, Habarana, Kekirawa, Galewela

This book is for those who consider serendipitous encounters fascinating rather than nerve racking! For those to whom travelling is about history and archaeology, people and encounters, art and sculpture, birds, trees and water, sweating it out and day dreaming...

"Grab this guide, follow a black & white board and discover a Sri Lanka you never imagined." – Sam Perera, Perera Hussein Publishing House

"The strong connection to the island, its people and its heritage runs like a red thread throughout this guide, truly a book by Sri Lankans on Sri Lanka." – Anu Weerasuriya, Studio Times Ltd.

BAFTA award-winning film maker Asitha Ameresekere brings his extraordinary talents to the page with his startling, thought provoking and tender offering of stories.

Shakespeare has a writing block and Medusa just doesn't like her hairstyle – of course! BAFTA award-winning film maker Asitha Ameresekere brings his extraordinary talents to the page with his startling, thought provoking and tender offering of stories. Incredibly charming and beautifully written with a balance of pathos and humour, Ameresekere shows us that a chance encounter, a hidden revelation, or even an engel could reconfigure the world. Ameresekere reveals the idisocyincrasies and odd logic that rule our lives, making this stunning debut the work of a writer with a spectacularly original and compelling voice.

'Ameresekere's consummate awareness of what makes a good story, his quirky sense of humour, and his ability to supply many points of view in the telling-including that of a dog-disclose a complex literary sensibility that belies his neophyte status as a writer' – Professor S W Perera

'Ameresekere is incomparable to any other Sri Lankan author to be published in recent years. His stories are bound to appeal to local as well as international readers not only because they are set in a wide array of places, but because Ameresekere chooses his narrative style to harmonize with the place and culture he is representing, a trait seldom seen in other contemporary writers. For Sri Lankan fiction fans and short story lovers alike, Wedding Gifts and Other Presents will not fail to entertain, amuse and surprise with its unique entourage of characters humorous twists of fate' – Chalani Ranwala

Stories of hope and courage

The book is a collection of stories that reflects the lives of disabled individuals across the globe. Each story is narrated by a courageous individual who refused to be defined and shaped by a label or a medical diagnosis. These individuals choose life and living instead of doom and gloom. They are not international superstars but are stars nevertheless because they valiantly defied limitations imposed on them despite the odds that were stacked against them. The stories are a gift of hope and inspiration to the countless number of individuals with disabilities.

You too can overcome!

The stories also carry a loving message to parents, care-givers, teachers, health professionals, neighbors, family and friends.

Look beyond the disability and recognize the person who is struggling to emerge!

Minimalist, imagistic and often violent

Aparna Halpe's poetry captures the nuance of personal journeys through loss, dislocation and exile, foregrounding the collective history of a nation and a people fractured by the lived experience of racial, cultural and class based conflict Precarious traces the journey from the comforting confines of home, to the chilling, ironic spaces of an adopted city - Toronto. Fittingly, the poems broker an uneasy truce between real and imagined belonging, returning full circle to the point of genesis.

'Beautiful meditations on nature, myth, history, violence and longing. Aparna Halpé combines linguistic precision with poetic sensuality, to deliver a collection that will leave you 'looking for mermaids' while 'learning how to drown'.' - Shehan Karunatilaka

'What lingers after reading Aparna's poems is not just a memory of a dissected land or 'strangled ice' surrounded by words & music, but half light rain frozen between precariousness and unknown pain.' - Cheran

Gunawardena has a poetic voice that is always a quiet and thoughtful one

A recording of brief and witty, carefully crafted impressions of life as she lived it. Here is a collection of poems that reveal a country loved and known.

'The limpid simplicity of her language reveals nuanced complexities of response and judgement that actively engage the reader's mind and emotions when the writer presents the interplay of cultures or personalities, or of the past, recent past and the present. She depicts herself as an unobtrusive observer "I love to watch through glass". She is also so acute and honest that her poems can evoke disturbing echoes' – Lakshmi de Silva

'The pull of her Motherland is clearly seen, yet without cloying sentimentality or paeans of praise to its scenic beauty' – Anne Abeysekera

A story of friendship, growing up and unrequited love...

"I also got the chance to see him up close. God! He was handsome! He looked like a street kid in school uniform but a bloody hot one."

Shehan has a crush on Robbie, his friend and classmate. Robbie is straight and finds Shehan's affections unsettling. But then, that is all Robbie has going for him in his turbulent life. And when they both realize it, it's already too late.

'Allah shouldn't have revealed so much to the Prophet. It only makes pious people like us suffer.'

So muses Khalid Khan a seventeen year old Afghan boy living in Melbourne. Khalid is like any other boy of his age in Australia; he loves his Footy, his mum's cooking and takes every opportunity to tease his sister Aisha. He believes in Allah although he sometimes wonders whether it is such a good idea to convert everybody in the world to Islam.
The quiet suburban life of Khalid's family is turned upside down one Friday morning when they have an unwelcome visitor. What follows is a hilarious – and poignant – intercultural encounter in multicultural Australia.

'Channa has a wonderful ear for the patois of teenagers. He helped me to empathise with the lives of people, whose religion is intertwined with their culture, and he did it with humour and insight which, given the political tenor of the times we live in, cannot be a bad thing.' - Michael Cooke, Doryanthes

A rags to riches picaresque for a man who gains the world and loses his soul.

Wheeler dealer, blackmailer and black marketer, Sam Kandy is not a very nice person. But he is a hell of a guy. Beggar's Feast is a novel about a man who lives in defiance of fate. Sam Kandy was born in 1889 to low prospects in a Ceylon village and died one hundred years later as the wealthy headman of the same village, a self-made shipping magnate, and father of sixteen, three times married and twice widowed. In four parts, this enthralling novel tells Sam's story from his boyhood-when his parents, convinced by his horoscope that he would be a blight upon the family, abandon him at the gates of a distant temple-through his dramatic escape from the temple and journey across Ceylon to Australia and Singapore, before his bold return to the Ceylon village he once called home. There he tries to win recognition for his success in the world-at any cost.

A novel about family, pride, and ambition, about what it takes for one man to make something out of nothing, set on a gorgeous, troubled island caught between tradition and modernity, "Beggar's Feast" establishes Boyagoda as a major voice in international literature.

'Let us neither over nor under state the case – this is a beautifully written book. It reads like a hot curry balanced against a mango relish' – Hubert O Hearn, Winnipeg Review

'A post-colonial Gatsby Beggars Feast is a picaresque about the clash of the worlds and the revenge of empires, about fate and history and harbours and birthright and brothels and moneylenders and metal-benders' – Mark Jarman , The Globe and Mail

'Boyagoda's narrative voice... is as lush as the tropical landscape of Ceylon, this voice, with its endless sentences, its mad cataloguing of things – a style sinuous, declamatory, periphrastic, peppered with extravagant metaphors and odd phrases' - Philip Marchand, National Post

Longlisted for the Dublin IMPAC prize

Short-listed for the Gratiaen Prize in 2011

Mariam a girl of mixed blood is uprooted from Kandy and transplanted to Sydney to escape the escalating ethnic conflict in the late 1990s. Displaced and disoriented, she fights to find her voice in a society that shows little empathy towards the 'lost in translation'. Her dream is to be an artist but her parents want her to be a doctor. Traumatised by rejection and loneliness, she looks for answers in all the wrong places to find what she has forgotten. Join Mariam in her emotional journey through different cultures numbed by set standards, routine and materialism, as she relates her story of 'coming home' through letters, poetry and sketches to her own daughter Faith.

A very absorbing and touching ... read – Amalshan Gunarathne

A novel that attempts to unify what divides humans – Smriti Daniels

Long Listed for the Dublin Impac Prize 2012

Writing with keen insight into the psyche of the displaced, Channa Wickremesekera, author of Distant Warriors and Walls, brings his characters into the close confines of a boat escaping a conflict zone. Will a series of unfortunate events precipitate disaster on them before nature unleashes a savage storm? Only time will tell as they race inexorably toward their destiny.

'A powerful and disturbing tale of our times in which the historical and the allegorical are combined with consummate skill. Channa Wickremesekera is among the most astute, inventive and courageous of Sri Lankan diasporic writers today' – Suvendrini Perera

'The novel can be read as a counter narrative of the colonial voyage... It is unromantic and unsentimental, even in some of its more tender moments, like that of the child seeking the whereabouts of the kitten she had brought on board or in the more horrifying ones , like the spraying of an 'insubordinate' passenger by the rebel leader, with bullets. A remarkable feature of its textuality is its refusal to produce a 'human' alternative to the political dilemma of nations and nationalities, borders and boundaries' – Sumathy Sivamohan