The second novel from the Sri Lankan Australian writer Ayesha Inoon begins on a boat on the open ocean. After a Tamil militant organisation orders seven-year-old Janu and her family to leave their home in Jaffna, the capital city of Sri Lanka’s Northern Province, they are forced to flee, crossing the Indian Ocean to Australia in the hopes of a safer life. To Janu, the novel’s central character, it seems as though the journey will never end.
When their mother dies on the boat, Janu and her two younger sisters are separated from one another, each informally adopted by different adults aboard. Although the catalyst for the plot is the Sri Lankan civil war, the novel is set largely in Australia and centres around the personal lives of Janu and her sisters, as well as on the wider Sri Lankan community in Australia.
