Wave: A Memoir
SynopsisPlot
In 2004, at a beach resort on the coast of Sri Lanka, Sonali Deraniyagala and her family—parents, husband, sons—were swept away by a tsunami. Only Sonali survived to tell their tale. This is her account of the nearly incomprehensible event and its aftermath.
Story
About this book
On the morning of December 26, 2004, a tsunami struck the southern coast of Sri Lanka. Sonali Deraniyagala was at a beach resort with her husband, her two young sons, and her parents. She was the only one among them who survived. Wave is her account of that event and of the years that followed it.
The memoir moves between two kinds of time. One is the immediate aftermath, in which Deraniyagala describes the first months of loss with a directness that resists softening or comfort. She writes about the difficulty of accepting what had happened, and about the resistance she felt toward a reality she could not change. The other strand reaches further back, tracing her life before the disaster: growing up in Colombo, studying at Cambridge where she met her English husband, settling in London, and raising her children. These memories surface gradually, carrying both pain and detail.
Deraniyagala, an economist by training, structures the book around the tension between remembering and enduring. The recalled scenes of ordinary family life sit alongside the present fact of their absence. The memoir holds these two states without forcing resolution between them.
