Wave

The memoir everyone has been talking about and moved by now in paperback. Universally acclaimed around the world and a national bestseller in North America, Wave is an extraordinarily brave, beautifully written memoir of loss by a survivor of the 2004 tsunami. About loss, it becomes a redemptive book about the power of love. For readers of literary non-fiction, Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, Cheryl Strayed’s Wild.
     On December 26, Boxing Day, Sonali Deraniyagala, her English husband, her parents, her two young sons, and a close friend were ending Christmas vacation on the south coast of Sri Lanka when a wave suddenly overtook them. She was only to learn later that this was a tsunami that devastated coastlines through Southeast Asia. When the water began to encroach closer to their hotel, they began to run, but in an instant, water engulfed them, Sonali was separated from her family, and all was lost. In the years following, as part of a lifetime process, and to keep her loved ones alive, she wrote. And the result is a beautifully crafted, extraordinarily honest, and utterly engrossing account of the surreal tragedy of a devastating event that all at once ended her life as she knew it and her journey since in search of understanding and redemption. It is also a remarkable portrait of a young family’s life and what came before, with all the small moments and larger dreams that suddenly and irrevocably ended.