Stories of conflict, turmoil and hardship are often told through the narrative of a family’s struggle, or the power of love in the face of adversity, and in Island Of A Thousand Mirrors, Nayomi Munaweera combines the two to reiterate the difficulties experienced in Sri Lanka during the civil war, and the need for unity. With the 2013 Commonwealth Book Prize for the Asian Region and a longlist place in the 2012 Man Asian Literary Prize already under its belt, the debut novel has clearly got a lot of potential for the western portion of the literary world too.
Set for a US hardback release date of the 2nd September 2014, while the UK market will have to wait until the 13th of October 2014 before it hits the shelf, Island Of A Thousand Mirrors is one to look out for. With a storyline that’s close to her own routes as a former Sri Lankan national who’s family emigrated to Nigeria when she was a young child to escape the Sri Lankan Civil War, only to move on to the US in her early teens, it’s a classic case of writing what you know, which would appear to have worked very well for Nayomi Munaweera.
The story is that of two families whose lives are torn apart by the violence and upheaval of the Sri Lankan civil war, which raged throughout the country between 1983 and 2009. As the tension between the majority ethnic group, the Sinhalese, and the minority Tamils rose to boiling point, atrocities, war and division became the norm in the fractured country.
The main character in the first half of the split narrative that makes up the novel is that of Yasodhara, who tells the story of her own Sinhala family, which saw its happy and idyllic life in the country’s capital, Colombo, threatened by the onset of the civil war. Old social hierarchies, ambitions and love are left behind them as they escape to find a less antagonistic existence in Los Angeles. However, with Yasodhara’s life already intertwined with a young Tamil girl’s, and ongoing vested interests in the situation in their home country, the move isn’t an easy cut and run for the family.
The second half of the narrative sees Island Of A Thousand Mirrors bring in the story of Saraswathie, who finds herself and her Tamil family living in the active war zone of Sri Lanka. The civil war quickly leads to the end of her dream of being a teacher as she’s arrested by a group of Sinhalese soldiers and dragged into the thick of the troubles. Despite doing everything she could to stay out of the madness, she finds herself at the mercy of the conflict, which leads her to an unexpected connection with Yasodhara thousands of miles away.
Nayomi Munaweera’s debut novel is a far-reaching and excruciatingly emotional story that personifies the differences between us and the bonds that unite, whether they’re between family, friend or foe. It spans the entirety of the 26 year civil war, showing the beauty of the people and land at the heart of the story, as well as the ugly truth about the division that so famously pulled it apart for such a large amount of the latter 20th century.
