Historical fiction books from Sri Lanka
Recommended historical fiction books (12)
Travel the world without leaving your chair.
If you are into historical fiction here are some historical fiction books from Sri Lanka for the next part of the Read Around The World Challenge.
1.
A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam EN
Description:
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2021 It begins with a message: a telephone call informing Krishan that his grandmother''s former care-giver, Rani, has died in unexpected circumstances, at the bottom of a well in her village in the north, her neck broken by the fall. The news arrives on the heels of an email from Anjum, an activist he fell in love with four years earlier while living in Delhi, bringing with it the stirring of distant memories and desires. As Krishan makes the long journey by train from Colombo into the war-torn Northern Province for the funeral, so begins a passage into the so... continue
2.
Anil's Ghost by Michael Ondaatje EN
Description:
With his first novel since the internationally acclaimed The English Patient, Booker Prize—winning author Michael Ondaatje gives us a work displaying all the richness of imagery and language and the piercing emotional truth that we have come to know as the hallmarks of his writing. Anil’s Ghost transports us to Sri Lanka, a country steeped in centuries of tradition, now forced into the late twentieth century by the ravages of civil war. Into this maelstrom steps Anil Tissera, a young woman born in Sri Lanka, educated in England and America, who returns to her homeland as a forensic anthropolog... continue
3.
Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje EN
Description:
Bringing to life the fabulous, colorful panorama of New Orleans in the first flush of the jazz era, this book tells the story of Buddy Bolden, the first of the great trumpet players--some say the originator of jazz--who was, in any case, the genius, the guiding spirit, and the king of that time and place. In this fictionalized meditation, Bolden, an unrecorded father of Jazz, remains throughout a tantalizingly ungraspable phantom, the central mysteries of his life, his art, and his madness remaining felt but never quite pinned down. Ondaatje's prose is at times startlingly lyrical, and as he c... continue
4.
Der englische Patient : Roman by Michael Ondaatje DE
Description:
Der Zufall verschlägt 4 Menschen unterschiedlichster Herkunft gegen Ende des 2. Weltkrieges in eine zerbomte Villa in der Toskana und verbindet sie zu einer Notgemeinschaft
5.
El Paciente Ingles by Michael Ondaatje ES
Description:
With ravishing beauty and unsettling intelligence, Michael Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning novel traces the intersection of four damaged lives in an Italian villa at the end of World War II. Each is haunted by the riddle of the fourth member, an English patient -- a nameless, burned man whose memories of passion, betrayal, and rescue illuminates this book like flashes of heat lightening.
6.
Funny Boy : A Novel by Shyam Selvadurai EN
Description:
A coming of age story about Arjun Chelvaratnam, who struggles with his homosexuality, entering into an affair with a schoolmate and breaking not only sexual taboos, but also social structures that separate the Tamil and Sinhalese.
7.
Swimming in the Monsoon Sea by Shyam Selvadurai EN
Description:
Although life for Amrith in 1980 Sri Lanka seems rather uneventful and orderly, things change in a hurry when his male cousin arrives from Canada and Amrith finds himself completely enamored with his new visitor. The setting is Sri Lanka, 1980, and it isthe season of monsoons. Fourteen-year-old Amrith is caught up in the life of the cheerful, well-to-do household in which he is being raised by his vibrant Auntie Bundle and kindly Uncle Lucky. He tries not to think of his life before, when his doting mother was still alive. Amrith's holiday plans seem unpromising: he wants to appear in his scho... continue
8.
The Cat's Table by Michael Ondaatje EN
Description:
In the early 1950s, an eleven-year-old boy boards a huge liner bound for England - a 'castle that was to cross the sea'. At mealtimes, he is placed at the lowly 'Cat's Table' with an eccentric group of grown-ups and two other boys, Cassius and Ramadhin. As the ship makes its way across the Indian Ocean, through the Suez Canal, into the Mediterranean, the boys become involved in the worlds and stories of the adults around them, tumbling from one adventure and delicious discovery to another, 'bursting all over the place like freed mercury'. And at night, the boys spy on a shackled prisoner - his... continue
9.
The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje EN
Description:
BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The bestselling author of Warlight traces the intersection of four damaged lives in an abandoned Italian villa at the end of World War II. “A rare spellbinding web of dreams.” —Time The nurse Hana, exhausted by death, obsessively tends to her last surviving patient. Caravaggio, the thief, tries to reimagine who he is, now that his hands are hopelessly maimed. The Indian sapper Kip searches for hidden bombs in a landscape where nothing is safe but himself. And at the center of his labyrinth lies the English patient, nameless and hideously burned, a ma... continue
10.
The seven moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka EN
Description:
WINNER OF THE 2022 BOOKER PRIZE A searing satire set amid the murderous mayhem of Sri Lanka beset by civil war Colombo, 1990. Maali Almeida, war photographer, gambler and closet gay, has woken up dead in what seems like a celestial visa office. His dismembered body is sinking in the Beira Lake and he has no idea who killed him. At a time when scores are settled by death squads, suicide bombers and hired goons, the list of suspects is depressingly long, as the ghouls and ghosts who cluster around him can attest. But even in the afterlife, time is running out for Maali. He has seven moons to try... continue