Brixton Beach

The first half of this book is set in Sri Lanka and is beautiful and evocative, full of colour, laughter and joy. The second half is heart wrenchingly sad. I read the second half with a permanent lump in my throat. It is the vitality of the first half that makes the second half so tragic. But for me none of this is what makes the book so memorable and kept me thinking about it for weeks after I had read it. The greatest achievement of this book is to give a name and a face and a story to what have become just numbers in the news these days. The book starts with a terrorist attack in central London, it then goes back to tell the story of one of the faceless "numbers" caught up in the attack. It is this life story that still haunts me, long after reading this beautiful book.