![]() “Slowly, my characters started revealing themselves,” she says. She began the book not knowing exactly where the narrative would go. “By the time I was sixteen I had a boyfriend and was sneaking out of the house.” She went on to study English and South Asian literature, but eventually abandoned academia because she felt compelled to write a novel. “It was amazing how fast I adjusted to the American way of life,” the author tells me. They moved to Nigeria, where Munaweera’s father, a civil engineer, helped build that country’s infrastructure, and after a military coup, fled to Los Angeles in 1984. Munaweera was born in Sri Lanka, but its troubled economy prompted her family to leave in 1976, years before the war began. ![]() An epic that traverses generations and borders, the book confronts the intimate repercussions of a conflict that cost over 80,000 lives, and explores the ways in which history defines and constrains us. Its subjects are a trio of women whose lives begin in the same place but then diverge: sisters Yasodhara and Lanka immigrate to the US, but Saraswathi remains in Sri Lanka and becomes a Tamil Tiger. Nayomi Munaweera’s debut novel, Island of a Thousand Mirrors, looks back at the civil war in Sri Lanka, a struggle nearly three decades long and one of the bloodiest in history. ![]()
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