Winner of the State Literary Award for the Best English Novel - 2022
LIKE MOTHS TO A FLAME is the story of one family. Of a diligent father, a beautiful mother, a mystic grandfather and an angered grandmother. Where did they come from? Why did they bond? How did they live in the present, bound to prisons of past experience?
LIKE MOTHS TO A FLAME is the result of several years of walking in war weary terrains understanding the nature of man, his faith, his speech, his desire, his diversity and his cultural priorities. It is the story of men and women who have been slighted, insulted, disregarded and cornered into a dead end street with no exit. They were forced to find the means of escape.Terrorism was one such means of exit.
Sinhala Only
Monsoons & Potholes
Theravada Man
This book is about Buddhists, Hindus, Christians, Muslims, Sinhalese, Tamils – that diversity which was once Ceylons strength, which ended when monks and merchants collaborated and a political grievance-monger triumphed through sheer rhetoric and the blessed will of democracy. “This book is not about insight. It is about hindsight. It is about people, not about a person.
It is an urban book where the protagonist is a young girl, who relates the political idiocies with the characteristic humor of urban irrelevance. It begins in 1963 and ends with the 1983 riots in Sri Lanka. Set in Sri Lanka, then Ceylon. A mad, bad, humorous, irrelevance and very personal autobiographical account of growing up in Sri Lanka through the years of deprivation and plenty.
It is a story of a village schoolmaster who finds his unwavering faith in Theravada Buddhism and the British educational system challenged by the irrational forces of astrology, numerology and human desire. To understand man’s shortcomings he consults an astrologer and his predictable existence threatened. Told with characteristic passion and humour, the story combines a satirical take on the Sinhala myth with a healthy dose of its own brand of mysticism.
Books written in Sinhala
ABOUT MANUKA
Manuka Wijesinghe is an author, playwright, actres and a Holistic Medical practitioner. She is also a lover of languages , living and dead. Her books are not constructions , but living testimonials of her life’s journeys made on foot, in carts, in trains, in boats and in automobiles into the heart of her island, Sri Lanka. Her books are the tales of men and women in Ceylon, later called Sri Lanka.
They are about an island’s people, formed by a land surrounded by an ocean, uncertain if it is an enemy or a friend. A people, whose link language to the world was severed by self indulgent political class. A people still trying to overcome that trauma and at each attempt they try, are repressed or slaughtered by a brute state.