This Divided Island

Winner of the Raymond Crossword Book Award-Non-Fiction, 2014In the summer of 2009, the leader of the dreaded Tamil Tiger guerrillas was killed, bringing to a bloody end the stubborn and complicated civil war in Sri Lanka. For nearly thirty years, the war's fingers had reached everywhere: from the bustle of Colombo to the curves of the eastern coast near Batticaloa and Trincomalee and the stark, hot north. With its genius for brutality, the war left few places and fewer people untouched.Samanth Subramanian draws out the story of Sri Lanka today-an exhausted, disturbed society still hot from the embers of war. Through travels and conversations, he examines how people reconcile themselves to violence, how religion and state conspire, how the powerful become cruel and how victory can be put to the task of reshaping memory and burying histories.