On Sal Mal Lane
A Novel
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3.2 • 6 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
In the tradition of In the Time of the Butterflies and The Kite Runner, a tender, evocative novel about the years leading up to the Sri Lankan civil war
* A Library Journal Best Indie Fiction of 2013 * A Largehearted Boy Best Book of the Year *
On the day the Herath family moves in, Sal Mal Lane is still a quiet street, disturbed only by the cries of the children whose triumphs and tragedies sustain the families that live there. As the neighbors adapt to the newcomers in different ways, the children fill their days with cricket matches, romantic crushes, and small rivalries. But the tremors of civil war are mounting, and the conflict threatens to engulf them all.
In a heartrending novel poised between the past and the future, the innocence of the children—a beloved sister and her overprotective siblings, a rejected son and his twin sisters, two very different brothers—contrasts sharply with the petty prejudices of the adults charged with their care. In Ru Freeman's masterful hands, On Sal Mal Lane, a story of what was lost to a country and her people, becomes a resounding cry for reconciliation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Political activist and journalist Freeman's second novel (after A Disobedient Girl) is set in early '80s Colombo, Sri Lanka, at the start of the civil war between the Sinhalese government and Tamil Tigers. Sal Mal Lane, named for its trees, is home to Tamils, Sinhalese, and mixed-race Burgher families whose children, aware of what separates them, still enjoy a normal life (cricket matches, romantic longings, a musical show), though Freeman never lets it be forgotten that tragedy looms. The Sinhalese Herath children take piano lessons with a Tamil teacher and befriend her ailing father. The strange Raju, a young Tamil man, looks after Devi, the youngest Herath a neighborhood favorite. The Silva family's two boys want to join the army to fight the Tigers, and Tamil boy Sonna Bolling feels so alienated that he falls in with thugs. When violence finally arrives, Sonna tries to stop it but is instead blamed with devastating consequences. Sustaining adult interest in young protagonists is Harper Lee hard, and had this saga which is three-quarters foreboding, one-quarter violent, heartbreaking denouement been more concise, it could almost have been called a masterpiece.
