Twelve Cries From Home – Out Now

 


“A deeply sensitive and sensitizing book that offers a sophisticated understanding of real pain, driven by a humanity that provides moral anchor in a terrain where the darkest instincts reign free.”  

Radhika Coomaraswamy 

 

Available Here

Publication date: 8 February 2022

 

Reviews

‘This collection of true stories is the vital afterwork of any war. It must be done and carefully and with the deepest integrity. Here, Salgado collects and records testimony from those caught up. We gasp at what is being shared. It must be shared, read, heard, collected, disseminated. This is prize-winning work.’

Monique Roffey, Costa Award-winning author of The Mermaid of Black Conch

 

 

***

‘In Twelve Cries from Home, Minoli Salgado gets to the heart of the distress of twelve ordinary Sri Lankans who have lived through personal horror: the death or disappearance of loved ones, even of families; their own maiming and wounding and trauma. In beautiful, often clipped prose, Salgado portrays their suffering and shows how chilling is the indifference and callousness that the victims receive in trying to find answers or to give a broken body even the most basic dignified burial. A valuable document of testimony gathered during a brief time of greater openness in a country still shattered by war and cruelty.’

Charles Haviland, Former Sri Lanka Correspondent, BBC News

 

 

***

‘A significant work of humanistic reportage, Twelve Cries From Home, by Sri Lankan academic and writer Minoli Salgado, draws attention to the experiences of those silenced by war through a beautifully-written study of traumatic acts and the effects of violence on displaced communities. Through twelve interweaving narratives, she paints a relentlessly and deeply true portrait of post-civil war Sri Lanka, her ancestral home.

Carried by the force of real-life conversations, Twelve Cries From Home is an empowered reclamation of muted experiences from the author’s travels through Sri Lanka, and the universal commonality of suffering and survival. It is a key work of remembrance and bearing witness, which hopes to come to terms with the past and begin to heal from it.’

Book review in Ozlanka (ozlanka.com)

 


Broken Jaw

Shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize
Longlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction

 


“A brilliantly innovative mosaic of short stories of great skill and exquisite language. This is a compelling and beautiful and important book.”

Robert Olen Butler 
Pulitzer Prize-winner

 

Available Here

 

Publication date: June 2019
From the back cover:

 “Broken Jaw is a beautifully orchestrated collection of eighteen stories set mainly in Sri Lanka. This brave and passionate book not only speaks against silences – official and unofficial – but also tests the limits of what can be said, reminding us that though it may be ten years since the civil war in the country ended, its legacy remains. These intricately crafted stories are at once enchanting and harrowing, full of resilience and courage, suffering and hope.”

Some online reviews can be seen here.


A Little Dust On The Eyes

Winner of the first SI Leeds Literary Prize
Longlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature

 

Front_Cover_ONLY

‘A luminous novel, enchanting from beginning to end.’
ROBERT OLEN BUTLER

‘An impressive exploration of traumatic loss, done with delicacy.’
ROMESH GUNESEKERA

‘Powerful, tender and moving.’
ABDULRAZAK GURNAH

Available Here

 

 

Reviews

‘An extraordinary novel of a country trying to come to its senses, to see and hear the thousands ‘disappeared’ by political conflict and environmental catastrophe. Minoli Salgado’s delicate, determined lyricism compels us to think of Sri Lanka’s missing and the silenced, always conscious of the formidable challenges of reading and writing about those displaced from us by time and tide. The result is a literary latticework of remarkable craft and subtlety that brings into focus Sri Lanka’s troubled past while shaping a necessary ethical response upon which the future might depend.’

Professor John McLeod, University of Leeds

***

‘For much too long, the literature of Sri Lanka has been overshadowed by that of its larger, more boisterous cousin India. But in Minoli Salgado’s wonderful book, Sri Lanka comes alive not only as a place of mythology, tragedies, both human and natural, but as a land of dreams and of a people whose resilient spirit has a Chekhovian beauty. Like Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost, Salgado’s work is an example of how we make literature out of the fire of near extinction. Her prose has the sublime beauty of a well- polished heirloom; something to be treasured.’

Syl Cheney-Coker

***

‘A Little Dust on the Eyes is a ​luminous novel, enchanting from beginning to end. Minoli Salgado is a splendid writer​ who transcends culture and nationality and speaks to the universal human condition.​’

Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize Winner

***

‘It is a great book – a wonderful elegy to a childhood and country lost.​’

Susheila Nasta MBE

***

‘A Little Dust on the Eyes is an extraordinary achievement, taking the reader into the multi-layered world of a Sri Lankan coastal community, a world where too many of the terrible events which happened during the Civil War can be still too raw, painful, and dangerous to acknowledge. Salgado’s evocation of this world and her characters is tender and compassionate, yet vivid, as we experience the tentative reunion of two cousins in the weeks preceding the Boxing Day Tsunami and its devastation.’

Lyn Innes, Emeritus Professor, University of Kent

 

Some online reviews can be seen here and here.

 

Minoli Salgado