Wave: A Memoir of Life After the Tsunami - Tapa dura

In her unflinching writing you live through the horror and despair, but also feel her self-generated repair and the promise of survival (Harriet Walter The Week)

This is the most powerful and haunting book I have read in years . . . In A Whaler's Dictionary there's the line, "Ishmael's impossible task is to write about a world that falls outside the realm of experience". And what Sonali Deraniyagala has done, in this beautifully written book, is to similarly give us a portrait of an event and its after-effects that we have never experienced or witnessed. At the same time she 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)

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)

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 My Own Country)

An amazing, beautiful book (Joan Didion)

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)

A stunning memoir of grief, and in the sense that it's "like" anything else, it is most "like" The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion's remarkable memoir... It is heart-stopping. Wave contains some of the best, most affecting writing about love and family that I have ever read . . . It is brutally unsentimental and completely raw: you periodically have to put it down and just breath. It is also wholly sui generis. I couldn't recommend it more highly. God, it's good, and God, she writes well: a love letter as well as a tragedy (India Knight Sunday Times)

The most moving book I have ever read about grief . . . a very, very fine book about love (William Dalrymple Scotsman)