Books

Incidents in the life of a surgeon, working in Ceylon Sri Lanka, from 1965 to 2005

"One month after assuming duties as DMO, I took delivery of the car in Colombo. That evening, with me seated by his side, my driver drove it through the night to Koslande 200 miles away. We reached home at about 2 a.m. the next day and went to sleep, dog-tired. On the next morning, we found a patch of oil beneath one wheel of the newly acquired car. The fault was a leak of brake-fluid. A faulty brake-washer from the wheel-cylinder had caused it. It was easily replaced, though it seemed an inauspicious beginning to a relationship with my new vehicle."

As a natural sequel to the hugely successful Remembered Vignettes, Dr. Philip Veerasingam traces his trajectory as a country doctor posted in remote and rural parts of Sri Lanka, culminating as Consultant Surgeon in Colombo. Travel with him on this fascinating journey and re-live the difficult working conditions and the necessity to improvise solutions on the job.

There comes a time when a girl must decide whether to leave or stay. This is the journey to that moment of choice.

Within the confines of the Galle Fort, Yasmin and her best friend Penny enjoy an idyllic childhood of sea swims, bike rides, and movies in a world that was fun, glamorous and free. But Yasmin comes from a tightly knit, conformist community that thrives on tradition, family bonds and honour, and eventually her friendship with Penny must end.

This sharply insightful memoir depicts a young Muslim girl's struggle to balance the traditions of a loving yet conservative father, who wants to keep her safe, against the more liberal Westernized Sri Lankan world outside. Stay, Daughter is a beautifully crafted story suffused with love, humour, and compassion. A memoir that provides a glimpse into the microcosmic Galle Fort Muslim community of the 1960s post-independent Sri Lanka.

A unique and important voice of our time - that of Muslim women.

A classic story of identity, love and Australia's modern heritage.

Cello States comes from the town of Corduroy and is definitely from the wrong side of the tracks. He escapes his life of drugs and gangs in the world of books, language and words, but when his father, a small time drug dealer clashes with a rival gang, he is forced to leave home. This drives Cello on a crime spree that eventually takes him to Melbourne, where he meets and falls in love with Oya Seyesene, a girl far removed from his world of violence and poverty. Half Sri Lankan, beautiful Oya is a child of privilege who despite having everything in life yearns for something else. Encouraged by her parents to find herself, Oya starts working at the Foundry, an avant-garde theatre where Cello has been working for the past few years. But it is a relationship fraught with tension and in danger of being overshadowed by the secret that Cello was part of a terrible crime that involved her family.

"An artful, beautifully written novel, dismantling the myth of a classless Australia. In turn black comic, lyrical and dark, Oya, Cello, and Planet Earth is wide ranging and insightful, exploring the rigid boundaries of power and privilege but also the possibilities of finding connection against the odds" - Kate Ryan, winner, Writers Prize, 2015 Melbourne Prize for Literature

You've always wondered how squirrels got their distinctive stripes. Well, once upon a time, clever little squirrels joined a legendary battle that took place in the land of Lanka. As reward for their valour they received a sign of affection that they carry even today! Read all about it with your children, from this beautifully illustrated collectible book.

The exciting sequel to Mythil's Secret

Mythil must put aside his problems with a school bully when his secret friend Asiri suddenly regains a part of his memory. But is Asiri's fantastic story from wartime Ceylon a figment of Mythil's imagination or did it really happen? Can Mythil use what he has learned on Asiri's Quest to overcome his problems at school? Join Mythil and Asiri on another spine-chilling, time-travelling adventure to find out!

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

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.

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.

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