Noontide Toll - Softcover

'Impressive and quietly devastating... Gunesekera conjures strange and wonderful images and writes with a wonderful deftness' --Financial Times

'Gunesekera is an extremely talented and empathetic writer. This is a moving account of individuals in a nation that continues to be ravaged by the aftermath of a long and terrible civil war. Excellent' --New India Express

'Nuanced and beguiling... The narrative is crafted with such care that when the veil of words lift, the calamity that lurks beneath rises like a tsunami, suddenly real... beautiful and sad, rising and falling like a love song' --Indian Express

'Poignant and illuminating... Noontide Toll will draw a new generation of readers to this most sympathetic of writers, graced with a poet's vision as well as an abiding sense of justice' --Irish Times

'Nuanced and beguiling... The narrative is crafted with such care that when the veil of words lift, the calamity that lurks beneath rises like a tsunami, suddenly real... beautiful and sad, rising and falling like a love song' --Indian Express

'Gunesekera writes in sentences prickling with irony... In these outstanding stories, the repercussions [of Sri Lanka's civil war] are documented with humane appeal and masterly finesse' --Sunday Times

'Arresting... Noontide Toll is an acute, sensuous cycle of interwoven short stories' **** --Sunday Telegraph

'This is an eye-opening series of interconnected short stories, which could also be read as an episodic novel' --Herald

'Romesh Gunesekera has long established himself as one of the most delicate contemporary handlers of English prose. This delicacy enables him to carry out unflinching operations on the most recalcitrant material' --Spectator

'With delicacy, subtlety and sad humour, Gunesekera skilfully steers back and forth across that line [between the mistakes of the past and the promise of the future after the Sri Lankan civil war]' --Boyd Tonkin, Independent

'A detached and meticulous documentation of civil strife and its management in Sri Lanka, Noontide Toll is a remarkable piece of writing' --The Hindu

'These twelve sparkling stories conjure Sri Lanka's effort to recharge tourism and investment in the wake of upheaval and serious civil strife. Gunesekera has a canny eye for new developments. He observes how the old, effete colonial world interfaces with the new. He is a poet working in prose' ***** --RTE Radio

'A detached and meticulous documentation of civil strife and its management in Sri Lanka, Noontide Toll is a remarkable piece of writing' --The Hindu

'Beautiful and haunting... Gunesekera is an exceptionally poised and potent craftsman' --Pico Iyer, Wall Street Journal

'A detached and meticulous documentation of civil strife and its management in Sri Lanka, Noontide Toll is a remarkable piece of writing' --The Hindu

'Humane warmth and bitter irony combine as Gunesekera surveys traumatised survivors, returned exiles, aid workers, shame-stricken army personal and opportunistic foreign visitors' --'Book of the Year', Peter Kemp, Sunday Times

'Noontide Toll gives a deceptively gentle, obliquely authoritative and essential tour of post-war Sri Lanka' --'Book of the Year', Helen Simpson, TLS

Vasantha is a van driver for hire, ferrying aid workers, returning exiles, and tentative entrepreneurs across the battle-scarred landscapes of Sri Lanka. The civil war is finally over, but the traumas of the past are still haunting. Behind the facade of peace we are made to remember the war: mysterious hoteliers conceal scars under their collars; genial old soldiers are secretly identified as perpetrators of brutal crimes; young Sinhalese men pine after Tamil girls whose brothers died by their hands. Vasantha keeps his own counsel, lingering on the periphery of his passengers' stories, but as time goes on he reveals a little of his own story too. Perceptive, sombre and finely-tuned, Noontide Toll paints an extraordinary portrait of a post-war Sri Lanka grappling with the ghosts of its troubled past.