A gripping and difficult read, giving a voice to the voiceless without placing a narrative onto them or projecting any personal prejudices.

Limited in part due to language barrier between interviewer and interviewees but almost fitting that such difficult stories are hard to share.

Thank you NetGalley for the Arc.

thank you to @netgalley and @repeater for the review copy 🤍

this is a beautiful collection of the stories of twelve people who were taken and disappeared during times of war in Sri Lanka. their family members shared their story, to be remembered, so that others could bear witness. Salgado intimately crafts a narrative from her interviews with the family members of the disappeared, reflecting on ideas of justice, of hope and despair, of bone crushing fear

i couldn’t help but to also think about Palestine, Congo, Sudan and every other country whose people are suffering from unimaginable violence at the hands of oppressive colonizers. none of us are free until all of us are free

“We just try to get by each day, put food on the table, educate the kids. You can call us survivors if you like but we just lived it out, that’s all. Don’t seek heroism in our survival when we owe our lives to contingency and chance. This is everyday violence, you understand. Each day, a struggle. The banality of evil needs to be understood in relation to the banality of survival, you might say. We survived. Get used to it. We are no more virtuous, forgiving or understanding than anyone else. We still search, look for answers. We get angry and seek justice, revenge. We learn to love and find our own peace. And we get on with this life that is in bits.”

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This book took me quite a long time to read, mainly because I had to take breaks every so often as the topics discussed in this book are at points very hard to read. This book is the account of different people, who all lived and lost loved ones through the Sri Lankan war. The author interviews them all around the island of Colombo and each interview is filled with pain, harsh realities, losses, and heartbreaks, but also hope for a better future and love.

This book is a very important read and I am glad I read it. I also learned so much about Sri Lanka and the war that raged there for decades. Before reading this book, I wasn’t familiar with it as much, but reading this book made me look into the war and Sri Lankan history more and to educate myself. It is a hard book to read, but at the same time it is powerful and it gave a voice to people who otherwise not be heard.

Overall: It is a hard read, full of pain, and suffering, but also hope and love. It’s people’s accounts of how their lost their loved ones and family members, as well as how they suffered themselves during war years. I think it is a very important read, albeit not a light one. I am glad I picked up this book and educated myself more about Sri Lanka and its history, as well as the recent war, through the accounts of those who lived through it.

I was not sure about this as thought it would be yet another western academic talking about things they have not experienced, but the Salgado seems to understand her limits as an interviewer: an expat, not fluent in the language and not trained in speaking to people about traumatic experiences. As a result she really takes a back seat and allows her interviewees to just speak.

I found the content hard going, but who wouldn't find this topic distressing? However, I really appreciated how Salgado didn't force a coherent narrative onto her subjects: the storytelling is as confused and chaotic as distressing memories usually are.

If you are interested in hearing real voices of Sri Lanka describing their personal experiences of war, this book is for you.

This is a very sensitively, often evocatively, written account of 1700 km journey the author took in her homeland of Sri Lanka in 2018. Travelling from one end of the island to the other, she interviewed 12 civilian survivors of the country's brutal civil war (1983-2009). This book, as former Under-Secretary of the United Nations Radhika Coomaraswamy states in her introduction, is the first to collect civilian testimonies from across Sri Lanka.

You will meet in the pages of this book sisters looking for their kidnapped brothers; fathers mourning the loss of sons; widows still traumatised by the murders of husbands. There is a community worker who lost 13 family members to aerial bombing by the Sri Lankan Air Force; and another who survived an attack by an LTTE suicide bomber. The witnesses belong to different communities, Sinhalese, Tamil and Muslim. Some know the killers of their loved ones; many do not. They have different reactions to loss and grief: some are bitter, others resigned, a few have become more compassionate. Most want justice; some would settle for revenge. What they share is a desire for answers and recognition, both of their own suffering and the suffering of their loved ones, in a place where speaking out about the disappeared and murdered is dangerous.

Minoli Salgado, a novelist, is very aware of her own place in Sri Lanka society. She realizes the cruel paradox of any investigation into human rights abuses: in order for such crimes to be addressed, the investigator must ask the survivors to relive the worst moments of their lives. She is also sensitive to the responsibilities of being a truthful witness to the overwhelming loss the twelve people interviewed have experienced.

This is an important book, to share such stories. It is also a book which ask the reader what their response is in the face of the human costs of war.

Salgado's interviews with survivors of the Sri Lankan civil war are hard-hitting and harrowing. Such accounts of violence throughout the book can be overwhelming at times but it also demonstrates how important it is for Salgado to tell the stories of these people and their families.

I must admit to having been quite ignorant with regards to the recent history of Sri Lanka and I feel now that I have gained a greater understanding of the structural violence and prejudice that existed there and appears to continue to exist.

I did find the book a little fatiguing at times and I'm not certain that the interview style worked at times. Perhaps the author felt they couldn't ask the survivors certain questions as it was difficult for them to disassociate due to their own connection to Sri Lanka.