Book Reviews

This review originally appeared in the Sunday Times Plus on the 25th of July 2021 Colourful pages from Dutch Ceylon Footprints is a historical novel that begins in Galle, for that is where author Premini Amerasinghe’s long ago ancestor hops off from the ship Laprienenburg, “one cloudless June day in… Read More »Footprints – Review by Yomal Senerath-Yapa in the Sunday Times

This review was originally published in the Sunday Times In a casual conversation in 2019, Ameena Hussein told me that she was writing a book on Ibn Battuta, the well-known Moroccan traveller and scholar of Islam who lived between 1304 and 1369. I was intrigued by how Hussein, a formally… Read More »Ibn Battuta in Sri Lanka: Review by Sasanka Perera

This review was originally published by Naina Bajekal writing for TIME Magazine Partway through Anuradha Roy’s All the Lives We Never Lived, the German artist Walter Spies makes the case for simply enjoying life in India amid the global upheaval of the 1930s. “We are oceans away from all that,” he… Read More »All The Lives We Never Lived: Review by TIME Magazine

This review was originally published on Kirkus Reviews Strict traditions face encroaching modernity in this memoir of a Muslim girl. The author was a jeweler’s daughter in Ceylon, now known as Sri Lanka, in the community of Galle Fort—at first blush, a traditional Muslim neighborhood. But in the 1950s, things… Read More »Stay, Daughter – Review on Kirkus Reviews

This review was originally posted on the World Literature Today website at www.worldliteraturetoday.org CHANDANI LOKUGÉ’S new novel, My Van Gogh, winds its way from Australia to France with the lilt of an ancient pilgrim song. The novel, which traces the journey of a young Australian man, Shannon, to France in… Read More »My Van Gogh – Review by Aparna Halpé on World Literature Today

I have just finished reading a delightful book, Sunil Tantirige’s charming collection of stories about his childhood in Sri Lanka in the sixties and seventies….

Originally posted by Padraig Colman in the Ceylon Today, on 21st January 2021 Rukmini Attygalle writes in her acknowledgements in her debut collection of short stories entitled Of Saris and Grapefruit, “To all those who, in one way or another helped me to: See clearly; Feel deeply; Laugh heartily.” The first… Read More »Of Saris and Grapefruit – Review by Padraig Colman