ON SAL MAL LANE
A Library Journal Best Indie Fiction of 2013
A Largehearted Boy Best Book of the Year
A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice
In the tradition of In the Time of the Butterflies and The Kite Runner, a tender, evocative novel about the years leading up to the Sri Lankan civil war.
On the day the Herath family moves in, Sal Mal Lane is still a quiet street, disturbed only by the cries of the children whose triumphs and tragedies sustain the families that live there.
A Library Journal Best Indie Fiction of 2013
A Largehearted Boy Best Book of the Year
A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice
In the tradition of In the Time of the Butterflies and The Kite Runner, a tender, evocative novel about the years leading up to the Sri Lankan civil war.
On the day the Herath family moves in, Sal Mal Lane is still a quiet street, disturbed only by the cries of the children whose triumphs and tragedies sustain the families that live there. As the neighbors adapt to the newcomers in different ways, the children fill their days with cricket matches, romantic crushes, and small rivalries. But the tremors of civil war are mounting, and the conflict threatens to engulf them all.
In a heartrending novel poised between the past and the future, the innocence of the children—a beloved sister and her overprotective siblings, a rejected son and his twin sisters, two very different brothers—contrasts sharply with the petty prejudices of the adults charged with their care. In Ru Freeman’s masterful hands, On Sal Mal Lane, a story of what was lost to a country and her people, becomes a resounding cry for reconciliation.
- Graywolf Press
- Paperback
- May 2014
- 424 Pages
- 9781555976767
Buy the Book
$16.00
About Ru Freeman
Ru Freeman is a Sri Lankan-American writer and activist. She has a Masters in Labor Relations and has worked in the field of American and international humanitarian assistance and workers’ rights. She is a freelance journalist whose articles on American foreign policy have been distributed worldwide in English, Sinhala and Farsi. She also writes regularly for the Huffington Post Books and Politics. Her creative writing has appeared or is forthcoming in
Guernica, Story Quarterly, VQR, Crab Orchard Review, World Literature Today, Post Road, Confessions: Fact or Fiction? and elsewhere. She is a contributing editorial board member of the Asian American Literary Review, and a fellow of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Yaddo and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her debut novel, A Disobedient Girl, was a finalist for the DSC South Asian Literary Prize, and has been translated into seven languages. She calls both Sri Lanka and America home and writes about the people and countries underneath her skin.
Praise
“[A] rich, sensory novel. . . . Freeman never strays far from the neighborhood’s youngest inhabitants. They are wondrous to behold, with their intelligence, imagination and innocence. I don’t know that I’ve seen children more opulently depicted in fiction since Dickens. . . . The novel soars [with] its sensory beauty, language and humor.” —Cristina Garcia, The New York Times Book Review
“[Freeman’s] individual characters are nuanced and richly written–you wish you could just stay on their peaceful lane forever, but of course you can’t, and neither can they.” —Oprah.com, “Book of the Week”
“Freeman’s gift for verisimilitude is manifest with searing clarity . . . And in fictionalizing Sri Lankan history, Freeman accomplishes what reportage alone cannot: she blends the journalist’s loyalty to fact with impassioned imagination.” —Booklist
“Piercingly intelligent and shatter-your-heart profound, Ru Freeman’s On Sal Mal Lane is as luminous as it is wrenching, as fierce as it is generous. This is a riveting, important, beauty of a book.” —Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild and Tiny Beautiful Things
Discussion Questions