In her Tiger training Saraswathi becomes a vengeful killer. The experience leaves her family ashamed of her, and she joins the guerilla organization Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam as a last resort. Saraswathi’s dreams of becoming the next village school teacher shatter when Sinhala soldiers abduct and sexually assault her. She is from the Tamil minority and loses all three of her brothers to the war.

Meanwhile, Saraswathi, the second narrator, grows up in the war-torn northern region of Sri Lanka. The family continues to receive news from Sri Lanka regarding the escalating tensions and eventual civil war, but they are safe in America, and the war feels removed from their lived experience. Yasodhara discovers a love of literature, while Lanka discovers a love of art. Yasodhara and Lanka grow up in America, where they eventually attend college. Yasodhara’s immediate family-her parents and younger sister-flee the violence and emigrate to the United States, where they struggle to acclimate to American life. After a mob murders their uncle for trying to protect a Tamil child, the violence moves closer to Yasodhara’s home until one night a mob demands that her family turn over their Tamil neighbors. In contrast to its natural beauty, Sri Lanka becomes increasingly violent and dangerous, although Yasodhara and her sister are relatively safer than their close friend and neighbor Shiva, who is a member of the minority Tamil population. Visaka marries Nishan despite still having feelings for her first crush, and Yasodhara and her younger sister Lanka are born into an educated and somewhat privileged realm of Sri Lankan society. Visaka also grows up in a family that values education, although her youthful escapades focus on a budding interethnic romance that ends in heartbreak. As a child, Nishan enjoys exploring the island’s untamed and unscathed natural beauty, but his mother Beatrice Muriel pushes him to focus on his studies as he grows older. The first narrator is Yasodhara Rajasinghe, who promises a story of her family and begins with the upbringing of her parents Nishan and Visaka. Part 1 covers Sri Lanka’s independence from Britain in 1948 through the beginning of the Sri Lankan Civil War in the 1980s. She reflects upon her sleeping partner who whispers her sister’s name. Readers should be warned that the novel includes graphic depictions of violence, including a first-person depiction of sexual assault and corresponding flashbacks.Ī brief Prologue opens the novel from the perspective of an unnamed female narrator.

Island of a thousand mirrors