Love, as a force in human affairs, is still not given much attention or credency by social scientists. With Notes on Love in a Tamil Family, Margaret Trawick places the notion of love prominently in social scientific discourse. Her unforgettable and profusely illustrated study is a significant contribution to anthropology and to South Asian studies. Trawick lived for a time in the midst of one large South Indian family and sought to understand the multiple and mutually shared expressions of anpu--what in English we call love. Often enveloping the author herself, changing her as she inevitably changed her hosts, this family performed before the young anthropologist's eyes the meaning of anpu: through poetry and conversation, through the not always gentle raising of children, through the weaving of kinship tapestries, through erotic exchanges among women, among men, and across the great sexual boundary. She communicates with grace and insight what she learned from this Tamil family, and we discover that love is no less universal than selfishness and individualism.

Documents the lives of 24 families in India over almost thirty years.

Enemy Lines captures the extraordinary story of boys and girls coming of age during a civil war. Margaret Trawick lived and worked in Batticaloa in eastern Sri Lanka, where thousands of youths have been recruited into the Sri Lankan armed resistance movement known as the Tamil Tigers. This compelling account of her experiences is a powerful exploration of how children respond to the presence of war and how adults have responded to the presence of children in this conflict. Her beautifully written account, which includes voices of the teenagers and young adults who have joined the Tamil Tigers, brings alive a region where childhood, warfare, and play have become commingled in a world of continuous uncertainty.

In this remarkable debut novel, a boy’s bittersweet passage to maturity and sexual awakening is set against escalating political tensions in Sri Lanka, during the seven years leading up to the 1983 riots. Arjie Chelvaratnam is a Tamil boy growing up in an extended family in Colombo. It is through his eyes that the story unfolds and we meet a delightful, sometimes eccentric cast of characters. Arjie’s journey from the luminous simplicity of childhood days into the more intricately shaded world of adults – with its secrets, its injustices, and its capacity for violence – is a memorable one, as time and time again the true longings of the human heart are held against the way things are.

A story of a child soldier in Sri Lanka's bloody civil war. Two days before Christmas in 1987, at the age of 17, Niromi de Soyza found herself in an ambush as part of a small platoon of militant Tamil Tigers fighting government forces in the bloody civil war that was to engulf Sri Lanka for decades. With her was her lifelong friend, Ajanthi, also aged 17. Leaving behind them their shocked middle-class families, the teenagers had become part of the Tamil Tigers' first female contingent. Equipped with little more than a rifle and a cyanide capsule, Niromi's group managed to survive on their wits in the jungle, facing not only the perils of war but starvation, illness and growing internal tensions among the militant Tigers. And then events erupted in ways that she could no longer bear. How was it that this well-educated, mixed-race, middle-class girl from a respectable family came to be fighting with the Tamil Tigers?

"A vivid, well-written, and deeply insightful ethnography."—Kirin Narayan, author of Storytellers, Saints, and Scoundrels "This is a book of true creative insight, originality, and extraordinarily rich materials. Clark-Deces shows a gift for finding and articulating very central, evocative cultural issues in her study of Tamil laments. She writes with sensitivity and care, and with a certain daring and boldness that repay close attention."—David Shulman, author of Classical Telugu Poetry "A stunning ethnographic essay."—Alan Dundes, author of Two Tales of Crow and Sparrow "In this book, Isabelle Clark-Deces gives us a clear-eyed view of the bond between the state of untouchability in India, and the pain of death and irretrievable loss. This is not a distanced work: the reader is always right there with the people Clark-Deces writes about; one can see them and hear their voices as one reads. The author also achieves some powerful theoretical insights that go beyond the words and other communicative acts of her informants."—Margaret Trawick, Professor of Social Anthropology, Massey University, New Zealand, and author of Notes on Love in a Tamil Family

A poignant, heartfelt new novel by the award-nominated author of Together Tea—extolled by the Wall Street Journal as a “moving tale of lost love” and by Shelf Awareness as “a powerful, heartbreaking story”—explores loss, reconciliation, and the quirks of fate. Roya, a dreamy, idealistic teenager living amid the political upheaval of 1953 Tehran, finds a literary oasis in kindly Mr. Fakhri’s neighborhood stationery shop, stocked with books and pens and bottles of jewel-colored ink. Then Mr. Fakhri, with a keen instinct for a budding romance, introduces Roya to his other favorite customer—handsome Bahman, who has a burning passion for justice and a love for Rumi’s poetry—and she loses her heart at once. Their romance blossoms, and the little stationery shop remains their favorite place in all of Tehran. A few short months later, on the eve of their marriage, Roya agrees to meet Bahman at the town square when violence erupts—a result of the coup d’etat that forever changes their country’s future. In the chaos, Bahman never shows. For weeks, Roya tries desperately to contact him, but her efforts are fruitless. With a sorrowful heart, she moves on—to college in California, to another man, to a life in New England—until, more than sixty years later, an accident of fate leads her back to Bahman and offers her a chance to ask him the questions that have haunted her for more than half a century: Why did you leave? Where did you go? How is it that you were able to forget me?

Selected as One of the Best Books of the 21st Century by The New York Times Set amid the havoc of the War on Drugs, this New York Times bestseller is an "astonishingly intimate" (New York magazine) chronicle of one family’s triumphs and trials in the South Bronx of the 1990s. “Unmatched in depth and power and grace. A profound, achingly beautiful work of narrative nonfiction…The standard-bearer of embedded reportage.” —Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted In her classic bestseller, journalist Adrian Nicole LeBlanc immerses readers in the world of one family with roots in the Bronx, New York. In 1989, LeBlanc approached Jessica, a young mother whose encounter with the carceral state is about to forever change the direction of her life. This meeting redirected LeBlanc’s reporting, taking her past the perennial stories of crime and violence into the community of women and children who bear the brunt of the insidious violence of poverty. Her book bears witness to the teetering highs and devastating lows in the daily lives of Jessica, her family, and her expanding circle of friends. Set at the height of the War on Drugs, Random Family is a love story—an ode to the families that form us and the families we create for ourselves. Charting the tumultuous struggle of hope against deprivation over three generations, LeBlanc slips behind the statistics and comes back with a riveting, haunting, and distinctly American true story.

In the late 1970s Ondaatje returned to his native island of Sri Lanka. As he records his journey through the drug-like heat and intoxicating fragrances of that "pendant off the ear of India, " Ondaatje simultaneously retraces the baroque mythology of his Dutch-Ceylonese family. An inspired travel narrative and family memoir by an exceptional writer.