For three decades, Sri Lanka's civil war tore communities apart. In 2009, the Sri Lankan army finally defeated the separatist Tamil Tigers guerrillas in a fierce battle that swept up about 300,000 civilians and killed more than 40,000. More than a million had been displaced by the conflict, and the resilient among them still dared to hope. But the next five years changed everything.
Rohini Mohan's searing account of three lives caught up in the devastation looks beyond the heroism of wartime survival to reveal the creeping violence of the everyday. When city-bred Sarva is dragged off the streets by state forces, his middle-aged mother, Indra, searches for him through the labyrinthine Sri Lankan bureaucracy. Meanwhile, Mugil, a former child soldier, deserts the Tigers in the thick of war to protect her family.
Having survived, they struggle to live as the Sri Lankan state continues to attack minority Tamils and Muslims, frittering away the era of peace. Sarva flees the country, losing his way - and almost his life - in a bid for asylum. Mugil stays, breaking out of the refugee camp to rebuild her family and an ordinary life in the village she left as a girl. But in her tumultuous world, desires, plans, and people can be snatched away in a moment.
The Seasons of Trouble is a startling, brutal, yet beautifully written debut from a prize-winning journalist. It is a classic piece of reportage, five years in the making, and a trenchant, compassionate examination of the corrosive effect of conflict on a people.
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 9781781686003
Number of pages: 368
Weight: 721 g
Dimensions: 235 x 156 x 34 mm
The Seasons of Trouble is devastatingly good. Rohini Mohan's intimately rendered account of the brutal end-game and unfinished aftermath of Sri Lanka's civil war is breathtakingly well-told. By focusing on the lives of three Tamils and telling their stories in novelistic detail, Mohini has revealed a modern tragedy of truly epic proportions. Haunting and unforgettable. - Jon Lee Anderson, New Yorker
A remarkable feat of empathy. Mohan paints her characters with such emotional richness that it's hard to believe the work is not a product of her imagination but of five years of painstaking reporting. - Adrian Chen, Slate ("Best Books of 2014")
Gripping and profoundly moving ... Rohini Mohan has produced an astonishing feat of reportage." - Charles Mahtesian, NPR ("2014’s Great Reads")
In large part a chronicle of war and its aftermath, Mohan's impressive study is also a Kafkaesque story of survival in a society riven by ethnic tensions and mutual distrust. - Lucy Popescu, Times Literary Supplement
Through the journeys and trials of Mugil and Sarava, in the period before and immediately after the civil war, Rohini Mohan has given us a glimpse into the lives of so many others who have also ended up on the losing side of Sri Lanka's civil war. Seasons of Trouble, though non-fiction, does what novels do best: it allows us into the hearts and minds of people who might be very different from us, but with whom we come to have a great empathy through inhabiting their lives. - Shyam Selvadurai, author of Funny Boy and The Hungry Ghosts
[P]oetic ... a thoroughly absorbing book. - Economist
A significant, though heartrending, account. - Alan Moores, Booklist
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