Helpful Score: 5
Although dark, difficult subject, an engrossing read. Excellent characterizations. Enlightening and heartbreaking at same time.
Helpful Score: 5
What a good read ... Ondaatje, author of The English Patient, writes this about his homeland - Sri Lanka. Very moving.
Helpful Score: 3
Takes place in Sri Lanka during modern times. A native woman returns after education in England and US. She is a forensic anthropologist with a quest to unlock the hidden past.
Helpful Score: 3
Like The English Patient, by the same author, this novel is a very intense story of a young woman caught up in the middle of a war--this one in Sri Lanka in the 1980s and 90s. I found it very moving, but there are some intense descriptions of atrocities.
Helpful Score: 3
Ondaatje writes of the unimagineable without preaching and with enough restraint to permit his reader to imagine what it would be like to live through such times. Wonderful.