Manoratne himself is struggling to make as much sense of the tensions in his family, as of the restrictions placed on his work by an establishment eager to tie up the loose ends. Lakshmi Herath, the wife of newspaper editor Manoratne Herath, is a Tamil, who left her family and roots to become part of another culture. The family is middle-class and Sinhalese-but not quite. Rajith Savanadasa, a Sri Lankan expatriate who lives in Melbourne, Australia, handles the question through five characters of a Colombo family in his first novel Ruins. The Syrian conflict is still raging, but Sri Lanka’s resolution of its own problems raises the question of how societies cope with the aftermath of their violent past. The war forced many Sri Lankans to leave their country, becoming refugees in Europe long before the continent was seized by the important issue following a civil war in Syria. The defeat of the Tamil Tigers, who fought for a separate state, brought peace to the island nation, but the consequences of the long war are still being debated in many forums at home and abroad. THE BLOODY civil war in Sri Lanka was crushed by the country’s military and political leadership in 2009, ending nearly three decades of war that claimed tens of thousands of lives.
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