Wave

From Barnes & Noble

The great Asian tsunami of December 2004 killed approximately 230,000 people. For Dr. Sonali Deraniyagala, that number still has less impact than what she saw with her own eyes: Within seconds, her husband and her two sons were drowned as they tried to outrun the sudden, violent waves; and in a hotel not far away, both her parents were washed away to almost instant death. In this poignant, yet spare and unsentimental memoir, she writes movingly of the life that she shared with the people she lost and how those memories helped her deal with her grief. Editor's recommendation.

The New York Times - Dwight Garner

Wave is a granular, tactile working through of grief, regret and survivor's guilt. It maintains a tight focus. Don't arrive here looking for statistics and a journalistic overview of the tsunami…It's a somber volume that suggests that Julian Barnes was right about grief, when he wrote in Flaubert's Parrot that you don't emerge from it cleanly, as if from a tunnel into sunshine. "You come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil slick," he wrote. "You are tarred and feathered for life"…Stories of grief, like stories of love, are of permanent literary interest when done well. I'm not convinced that Ms. Deraniyagala is a great writer…but a form of greatness reverberates from her simple and supple prose here.

The New York Times Book Review

…the most exceptional book about grief I've ever read. In prose that's immaculately unsentimental and raggedly intimate, Deraniyagala takes us deep into her unfathomable loss…In spite of its subject matter, she manages to imbue the book with the faintest whiff of hope. Not the cheesy, cooked-up hope that comes with a lifetime guarantee of happiness, but the real kind of hope, the tiny sort that one has no choice but to cling to when everything else has been ripped away. The word "brave" is used a lot to describe those who write about their deepest traumas—too often, I think—but it's an apt description of Deraniyagala. She has fearlessly delivered on memoir's greatest promise: to tell it like it is, no matter the cost. The result is an unforgettable book that isn't only as unsparing as they come, but also defiantly flooded with light.

Publishers Weekly

Deraniyagala's debut book recounts her life after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami took the lives of her parents, husband, and two sons in Sri Lanka. After being pulled from the muddy wasteland that was formerly the jungle surrounding her hotel, Sonali is taken to a hospital where the reality of her family's death creeps into her psyche. As their bodies are found, Sonali begins to withdraw from the world, searching the internet for the best way to kill herself, drinking every drop of alcohol she can find—including bottles of aftershave—and tormenting the renters of her parents' now vacant house. As she gradually returns to her life, she begins to find the absence of things intolerable, nearly breaking down when she doesn't hear her husband or sons in the house, secretly eating chocolate in the guest room. This is a story not about overcoming grief and loss, but of embracing reality in the face of pain and sadness. It packs an immense punch for being so short—or perhaps because it is so short. Conquering the clear difficulties that come with talking about such profound absences, Deraniyagala has written a book teaming with beautiful ruminations on the bittersweetness of memory and the precariousness of life. (Mar.)

From the Publisher

“The most exceptional book about grief I’ve ever read . . . I didn’t feel as if I was going to cry while reading Wave. I felt as if my heart might stop . . . Deraniyagala has fearlessly delivered on memoir’s greatest promise: to tell it like it is, no matter the cost. The result is an unforgettable book that isn’t only as unsparing as they come, but also defiantly flooded with light . . . Extraordinary.” —Cheryl Strayed, New York Times Book Review
 
“An amazing, beautiful book.” —Joan Didion, author of The Year of Magical Thinking

“Radiant . . . The extremity of Deraniyagala’s story seizes the attention, but it’s the beauty of how she expresses it that makes it indelible . . . [She is] a writer of such extraordinary gifts . . . Wave is a small, slender book, but it is enormous on the inside.” —Salon

“Heart-stopping . . . A stunning memoir of grief . . . Wave contains some of the best, most affecting writing about love and family that I have ever read . . . It is also wholly sui generis. I couldn’t recommend it more highly.” —Sunday Times (UK)
 
“Although for much of the book, we are privileged to be with her as she conjures and re-conjures her joyous family, what emerges from this wizardry most clearly is, of course, Deraniyagala herself—carrying within her present life another gorgeously remembered one.” —San Francisco Chronicle
 
“Unforgettable . . . It is a miracle Deraniyagala lived. The fact that she could write such a memoir, bringing those she loved to life so completely that they breathe on the page, is itself a miracle.” —Vanity Fair

“Wave is a haunting chronicle of love and horrifying loss. The heartfelt writing manages to render the absence of the loved ones—the void, and the pain of it—in such a beautiful way that what was lost emerges as a new life form, one whose flesh and sinew are memory, sorrow, and undying love.” —Abraham Verghese, author of Cutting for Stone

“Courageous, truthful and, above all, generous . . . What amazed me most about the book is what good company it is. Deraniyagala is accepting and tender in her record of grief . . . Wave is in fact full of persisting life.” —Globe & Mail (Canada)
 
“Immeasurably potent . . . Relentless in its explication of grief, this massively courageous, tenaciously unsentimental chronicle of unthinkable loss and incremental recovery explodes—and then expands—our notion of what love really means.” —More magazine

“An indelible and unique story of loss and resolution written with breathtaking refinement and courage . . . In rinsed-clear language, Deraniyagala describes her ordeal, surreal rescue, and deep shock, attaining a Didionesque clarity and power. We hold tight to every exquisite sentence as, with astounding candor and precision, she tracks subsequent waves of grief . . . But here, too, are sustaining tides of memories that enable her to vividly, even joyfully, portray her loved ones.” —Booklist

“Out of unimaginable loss comes an unimaginably powerful book. Wave is unflinching as it charts the depths of grief, but it's also, miraculously, a beautifully detailed meditation on the essence of happiness. I came away from this stunning book with a new appreciation of life’s daily gifts. I urge you to read Wave. You will not be the same person after you've finished.” —Will Schwalbe, author of The End of Your Life Book Club
 
“The most powerful and haunting book I have read in years . . . Sonali Deraniyagala has brought back to life in this stunning memoir all those she lost, so much so that we will never forget them or their lives.” —Michael Ondaatje, author of The English Patient

“Both heartbreaking and astonishingly beautiful.” —New York Post
 
“A devastating but ultimately redemptive memoir . . . The craft and control reflect an exceptional literary command . . . Excellent. Reading Deraniyagala’s account proves almost as cathartic as writing it must have been.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred)

“Rarely are we given a story of such narrative force and poetic simplicity . . . Being spared, Deraniyagala seems doomed to spare herself nothing. Wave is a beautiful offering to readers. Bravissima.” —Mary Karr, author of Lit

Library Journal

The Indian Ocean tsunami that broke loose on December 26, 2004, killed something like 230,000 people, including Deraniyagala's parents, husband, and two young sons. And though she opens by taking us straight into the wave, 30 feet high and rushing toward Sri Lanka at 25 miles an hour, her book is ultimately an account of her coping with her grief while also celebrating the memories of those she loved. As she ranges over her childhood in Colombo, meeting her English husband at Cambridge, and the birth of her children, we learn how she managed to keep these wrenching memories, and hence her family, with her.

Kirkus Reviews

A devastating but ultimately redemptive memoir by a survivor of the 2004 Sri Lankan tsunami, who must come to terms with the deaths of her husband, her young sons and her parents from the natural disaster that somehow spared her. Deraniyagala is an economist, and her matter-of-fact account is all the more powerful for its lack of literary flourish, though the craft and control reflect an exceptional literary command. Every word in these short, declarative sentences appears to have been chosen with great care, as if to sentimentalize the experience or magnify the horror (as if that were possible) would be a betrayal of all she has lost. It's no surprise when the first and strongest acknowledgment goes to her therapist: "This book would not exist without his guidance and persuasion. With him I was safe, to try and grasp the unfathomable, and to dare to remember." "The water was pulling me along with a speed I did not recognize, propelling me forward with a power I could not resist," she writes of what she later learned was "the biggest natural disaster ever," one that would claim a quarter of a million casualties. "I had to surrender to this chaos…," she continues. "My mind could not sort anything out." Eventually, the numbness of her survival gives way to profound guilt (she should have done something, she should never have brought them there), rage, a refusal to sleep (lest she awake to the fantasy that her family was still alive), an attempt to avoid any experience or memories she shared with them and an obsessive pull toward suicide. And then, as miraculously as her rescue, she eventually reached the point where "I want to remember. I want to know." The more she remembers about their life before the tsunami, and in greater depth and detail, she writes "I am stunned. I want to put a fist through these last six years and grab our life. Claim it back." Excellent. Reading her account proves almost as cathartic as writing it must have been.