Books About Sri Lanka: What to Read Before You Arrive

The Mahavamsa, the great chronicle of Sri Lankan history written in Pali by Buddhist monks from the fifth century CE, is one of the most extraordinary historical documents in Asia. It covers over two thousand years of Sri Lankan history in verse form and remains the primary textual source for the ancient period of the island's past. Reading even a portion of it before you visit the ancient cities gives the ruins an entirely different dimension.

Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family is the essential memoir for understanding Colombo's colonial Burgher world and the particular way family, memory, and place intersect in Sri Lankan life. It is funny, lyrical, and completely honest about the strangeness of a society where multiple traditions and histories have been compressed into a small island. Read it before you visit Colombo and see whether the city reveals itself differently.

Romesh Gunesekera's Reef and The Match are novels that use Sri Lanka as both setting and subject in ways that are illuminating without being documentary. Carl Muller's Burgher trilogy captures a community and an era with the kind of specific detail that only insider knowledge produces. Shyam Selvadurai's Funny Boy navigates the Tamil community's experience with honesty and emotional precision.

For non-fiction, Leonard Woolf's diaries from his time as a colonial administrator in the early 20th century provide a startlingly vivid account of rural Sri Lankan life that is both of its time and strangely contemporary in its observations. John Still's The Jungle Tide is the naturalist classic of the island. Both are available in bookshops in Colombo and Galle. Buy them there rather than ordering them before you come. Find them in their context.