The book opens & we are inside the wave: thirty feet high moving at twenty-five mph racing two miles inl&. & from there into the depths of the author's despair: how to live now that her life has been undone? Sonali Deraniyagala tells her story
- the loss of her two boys her husband & her parents
- without artifice or sentimentality. In the stark language of unfathomable sorrow anger & guilt: she struggles through the first months following the tragedy -- someone always at her side to prevent her from harming herself her whole being furiously clenched against the reality she can't face; & then reluctantly emerging & over the ensuing years slowly allowing her memory to function again. Then she goes back through the rich & joyous life she's mourning from her family's home in London to the birth of her children to the year she met her English husband at Cambridge to her childhood in Colombo while learning the balance between the almost unbearable reminders of her loss & her fundamental need to keep her family somehow still with her.