She began the book not knowing exactly where the narrative would go. “By the time I was sixteen I had a boyfriend and was sneaking out of the house.” She went on to study English and South Asian literature, but eventually abandoned academia because she felt compelled to write a novel. “It was amazing how fast I adjusted to the American way of life,” the author tells me. They moved to Nigeria, where Munaweera’s father, a civil engineer, helped build that country’s infrastructure, and after a military coup, fled to Los Angeles in 1984. Munaweera was born in Sri Lanka, but its troubled economy prompted her family to leave in 1976, years before the war began. An epic that traverses generations and borders, the book confronts the intimate repercussions of a conflict that cost over 80,000 lives, and explores the ways in which history defines and constrains us. Its subjects are a trio of women whose lives begin in the same place but then diverge: sisters Yasodhara and Lanka immigrate to the US, but Saraswathi remains in Sri Lanka and becomes a Tamil Tiger. Nayomi Munaweera’s debut novel, Island of a Thousand Mirrors, looks back at the civil war in Sri Lanka, a struggle nearly three decades long and one of the bloodiest in history.
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