Read Yes
Length 310
Quick Review This is a book where you think you know exactly what’s going to happen from the very beginning and you spend the entire book hoping it doesn’t happen. It’s a fabulous insight into a journey and thought process no one really wants to think about.
Nayomi Munaweera writes What Lies Between Us, a compelling story about a young girl pulled away from everything she knows in Sri Lanka into a new existence in San Francisco, United States after a personal and familial tragedy. She learns how to handle herself and her background in a country entirely different from everything she knew in her home country.
Trigger Warning: If you can’t handle abuse, you will have a difficult time reading past the first thirtyish pages.
Munaweera writes a story grounded in heartbreak. The main character is vibrantly torn between herself and her culture, herself and her desires, and herself and her past. She walks through life carrying the same weight many abuse survivors experience.
If you read this books, which I hope you will, this is one of the more depressing sentences I’ve written: The protagonist, is one of the most relatable, human characters I have ever read. This is incredibly personal and absolutely not universal. You will have to read it to understand what I mean by this. So go out and buy it. You can even do that here, that’s how much I want you to read it.
Munaweera delves into a psychology so rarely visited or explored by writers or philosophers or anyone because the most basic instinct is to write off catastrophes and those consequences as inhuman. We dehumanize all that is difficult to comprehend, but how do we know what we would do unless we’re in the same position. It is hard to look past some horrors to their cause because we think it is impossible any caring or decent or even good person could commit these atrocities. It is hard to declare horrific acts as human, but in all reality they are.
What Lies Between Us explores one of my life’s mantras… Never judge someone unless you’ve lived their story.
Memorable Quote
“They say that family is the place of safety. But sometimes this is the greatest lie; family is not sanctuary, it is not safety and succor. For some of us, it is the secret wound. Sooner or later we pay for the woundings of our ancestors.”
Title: What Lies Between Us
Author: Nayomi Munaweera
Publisher: St. Martin’s Griffin
Copyright: 2016
ISBN: 9781250043948
