Looking forward to my second visit to Sri Lanka this winter, I read Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje, a memoir of the author’s family life in Sri Lanka, to get me in the mood. It is another great reflection of the country to add to those fictional and autobiographical takes I’ve been reading lately (see my blogs on Seek the Singing Fish, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, and A Passage North).

It’s a book of fractures of time, memories and imaginings. It includes poetry, fly-on-the-wall dinner conversations, family photos, outrageous stories of drunkenness and gun-toting exploits where trains are held-up by the author’s relatives in the 1920s and 1930s. In doing so, it conjures a sense of time and place beautifully, before the country was torn apart by civil war. A very enjoyable read.