Michael Ondaatje's memoir of returning to Sri Lanka to recover his family's history — Dutch, Tamil, Sinhalese, and British all tangled together across two centuries. The book moves between Colombo and Kandy and the surrounding hill country with an intensity that is more poetry than reportage. Ondaatje grew up partly in Kandy before leaving for England and Canada, and his return to the island as an adult is suffused with the strangeness of coming back to a place you half-remember.
One of the most vivid accounts of colonial and post-independence Sri Lanka written in English, and far more interesting than any conventional travel guide.