Sonali Deraniyagala - Wave

Steve enjoyed our son’s account of me, of course. He egged him on. “Clever boy, Mal, spot on, you’re exactly right. You tell it like it is.” So “Mummy Lissenburgh!” Malli would chant. And the three silly boys would fall about laughing. Now I sit in this garden in New York, and I hear them, jubilant, gleeful, on our lawn.

Thank you most of all to Mark Epstein, my extraordinary therapist. This book would not exist without his guidance and persuasion. With him I was safe, to try to grasp the unfathomable, and to dare to remember.

A huge thank-you to Radhika Coomaraswamy, Sarah Gordon, Malathi de Alwis, and Amrita Pieris, who read every fragment of this book, and kept insisting on more, through the years.

Many thanks to Swyrie and Ken Balendra, Beverley Wood, Naomi Collett, Anita Grigoriadis, Margaret Headland, Natasha Balendra, Ruvanthi Sivapragasam, Carole Burgher, Kevin Brown, Lester Hudson, Maria Hudson, Sithie Tiruchelvam, David Brown, Keshini Soysa, Linda Spalding, Suki Sandler, and Sophie Wood, who responded to the book and encouraged me at various stages of writing.

My profound thanks to Michael Ondaatje, whose support has meant so much to me.

I am truly grateful to my agent, Ellen Levine. Many thanks to Lennie Goodings.

Many thanks to Carol Devine Carson, Pei Loi Koay, and Gabrielle Brooks at Knopf, and to Kendra Ward and Scott Richardson at McClelland and Stewart.

A very special thank-you to Sonny Mehta and Diana Coglianese in New York, and to Ellen Seligman, in Toronto. I am so moved by all they have done to bring this book into the world. Their care and dedication as my publishers and editors have been phenomenal, and it’s been such a treat to work with them.

Sonali Deraniyagala has an undergraduate degree in economics from Cambridge University and a doctorate in economics from the University of Oxford. She is on the faculty of the Department of Economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and is a research scholar at Columbia University.

For more information, please visit www.aaknopf.com