Currently reading
Hieroglyph: Stories and Blueprints for a Better Future
Ukraine: Zbig's Grand Chessboard & How the West Was Checkmated
The Girl on the Train: A Novel
Our Souls at Night: A novel
Above the Waterfall
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Designs on Film: A Century of Hollywood Art Direction
The Homicide Report: Understanding Murder in America
Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania
The Gods of Mars
Anil is an expat Sri Lankan, expert in the forensics of old bones. She returns to Sri Lanka to examine archeological remains and discovers evidence of recent atrocities. This is a portrait of a Sri Lanka riven with murderous conflict, a fascist state in which dissent yields death. Thousand are murdered on an ongoing basis, and no evidence of wrongdoing will be allowed to reach daylight. Anil fights her own memories of life in Sri Lanka, family, relationships. There are several memorable characters, including a disgraced anthropologist reduced to blindness and an austere life that he found satisfying, another anthropologist who gets Anil involved in the atrocity evidence. It is very interesting. Recommended
P 56
In a fearful nation, public sorrow was stamped down by the climate of uncertainty. If a father protested a son’s death, it was feared another family member would be killed. If people you knew disappeared, there was a chance they might stay alive if you did not cause trouble. This was a scarring psychosis in the country. Death, loss, was ‘unfinished,’ so you could not walk through it. There had been years of night visitations, kidnappings or murders in broad daylight. The only chance was that the creatures who fought would consume themselves. All that was left of law was a belief in an eventual revenge towards those who had power.