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Amma
Singapore, 1951 When Josephina is a girl, her parents lock her in a room with the father of the boy to whom she's betrothed. What happens next will determine the course of her life for generations to come.
New Zealand, 1984 Josephina and her family leave Sri Lanka for New Zealand. But their new home is not what they expected, and for the children, Sithara and Suri, a sudden and shocking event changes everything.
London, 2018 Arriving on her uncle Suri's doorstep, jetlagged and heartbroken, Annie has no idea what to expect - all she knows is that Suri was cast out by his Amma for being gay, like she is.
Moving between cities and generations, Amma follows three women on very different paths, against a backdrop of shifting cultures. As circumstance and misunderstanding force them apart, it will take the most profound love to knit them back together before it's too late.
New Zealand, 1984 Josephina and her family leave Sri Lanka for New Zealand. But their new home is not what they expected, and for the children, Sithara and Suri, a sudden and shocking event changes everything.
London, 2018 Arriving on her uncle Suri's doorstep, jetlagged and heartbroken, Annie has no idea what to expect - all she knows is that Suri was cast out by his Amma for being gay, like she is.
Moving between cities and generations, Amma follows three women on very different paths, against a backdrop of shifting cultures. As circumstance and misunderstanding force them apart, it will take the most profound love to knit them back together before it's too late.
292 pages, Paperback
First published April 4, 2024
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March 31, 2025
Longlisted for the 2025 Women's Prize for Fiction
Josephina accepted that taking a man's life would have consequences. But she thought they clung only to her, When she smelled the dead on her daughter's skin she felt sure something bad was coming. That she would look into her baby's eyes and see retribution looking back, but in the room there was only silence. There was only a little baby girl, born with a head of hair so full the midwife whooped when she crowned.
Amma is a debut novel by Sri Lankan Pākehā writer Saraid de Silva and won the inaugural Crystal Arts Trust Prize in 2021 before being edited and published in the UK by Weatherglass Books.
It will be available in 2024 for subscribers to Weatherglass Books (see below) and/or the Republic of Consciousness Book of the Month club.
The first three chapters introduce us to the three key matrilineal characters:
- Annie: Annie Ano Fernando (b. 1990), who we first meet in London in 2018, where she has gone in search of her uncle, Suri, of who she has no memories, him having left New Zealand for London in the early 90s
- Sithara: Maria Louisa Sithara Fernando (b. 1969), her mother and Suri's elder sister, who we first meet in Invercargill, New Zealand, a small town that thinks it is a city, at the bottom of a country full of white people who think they live in England, where she and her husband Ravi emigrated in 1978 from Sri Lanka.
- Josephina: Josephina Colette Paluvettaraiyar (b. 1941), Annie's grandmother and the titular 'Amma', who we meet in Singapore, 1951, where she lives with her parents, but largely cared for by her grandmother who is originally from Pondicherry.
de Silva currently works as a writer for a New Zealand's longest-running soap opera, and each of these chapters draws the reader into the story of the family, most dramatically in the case of Josephina who, aged just 10, is raped by the father of a potential suitor (seemingly with her parent's tacit connivance), and reacts by pushing a marble statue of Mary onto her attacker's head, killing him.
Gran killed her rapist. Somehow this is not new; it is like a song Annie is listening to decades later, remembering all of the lyrics. Gran killed her rapist because of course she did. Annie sees the three of them — Gran, Mum and herself —swimming in the same dark water.They don't cross paths, they just stay side by side, keeping their eyes locked on one another.
This is a novel of people finding their place in the world, both geographically, and in their sexuality and relationships. The story continues to alternate between the third-person perspectives of these three generations of women, moving non-linearly through time and taking Amma, and us, from Singapore, to Colombo, New Zealand (from Invercargill to Hamilton and Christchurch) and then to Melbourne, with Annie's side-trip to see Suri in London.
The violence that began Josephina's introduction to her developing sexual attractiveness to predatory men runs as a current throughout the novel, as is the theme of the three women each taking control and where needed retaliation (Josephina on her rapist; Sithara on some white youths who threaten Suri when they discover he is gay; and Annie on her errant and violent father, Paul).
But the novel's highlight is the lush, evocative prose. Distinctively the state of the characters' hair is a key motif and signaller of their moods - starting with how we are introduced to Sithara:
Maria Louisa Sithara Fernando sits on the floor of her bedroom getting ready for school. It is 7am on a frozen morning in July. Her room is lit by one bulb on a stand with no lampshade. Her hair, long enough to kiss her waist, is dead.
Back home, in Colombo, her hair was alive. It floated outwards as though underwater when she was sad, unfurling softly around her face. Sometimes it said the things that she could not. Her hair reached out to her amma when they lay down after lunch, too full and too hot to do anything other than bask like lizards on the wooden seat they called a couch and watch the ceiling fan twist slowly above them. Things have changed since she got here. Her family, herself. Both have shrunk. And when Appa died, her hair gave up.
Or from the same chapter, recalling the family's arrival in a cold, empty New Zealand:
Amma wore a jacket and a coat over a banana-yellow sari. She stuck out on the dull street like a sunflower. They had no real winter clothes. Amma stuffed a pink sarong under a sun hat as they walked here, it drooped out from the rim like big wilted petals. She let her suitcase fall to the footpath, pushed both hands deep into her sleeves and scowled.
Appa just looked at the empty roads, checked left and right as though he had missed something. His hair was like Sithara’s used to be, an extension of his thoughts, breathing. He kept it long at the top, brushed back from his face in an elegant side parting. When he was happy his curls rustled together like whispering leaves.
[...]
Sithara and Suri stood still, as paralysed as their parents, waiting for a cue. Suri’s chubby fingers held Sithara’s tight. She had to make being here okay. She tried to think of something to make Suri smile, but lost the words in surprise when she opened her mouth and saw her breath materialise in front of her. She reached out a hand, trying to touch the ghost of her thoughts.
Where are all the people? Appa said softly, as the strangeness of this place poured over them all.
This is the epitome of the great story-telling built up from beautiful sentence-making which Weatherglass Books was founded to publish - highly recommended and a book I very much hope to see on the Women's Prize for Fiction list.
The publisher
Weatherglass Books is a small independent press founded by Neil Griffiths (novelist and founder of the Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses) and Damian Lanigan (novelist and playwright).
They publish three novels a year, all of the highest literary quality, and I would highly recommend their subscription service.
Weatherglass was founded on a shared love of Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower and a shared fear that it wouldn’t find a publisher today. Weatherglass Books wants to clear a space for the next The Blue Flower.
“Running the Republic of Consciousness Prize I read hundreds of novels from small presses and loved a great many, but I did feel an absence of novels that were somehow exquisite at the simplest level: great story-telling built up from beautiful sentence-making.” Neil Griffiths, co-publisher
"We’re looking for intelligent, original, beautiful writing, and we're finding it. Additionally - maybe it's a reaction to the unhinged, fictional-seeming times we live in - we find writers trying to be truthful. It's a fascinating combination: writers who have extraordinary things to say, and are saying them with energy and style, whilst also trying to express something real and true about the world. It's bracing and exciting. It feels like the perfect time to start a literary press.” Damian Lanigan, co-publisher
Josephina accepted that taking a man's life would have consequences. But she thought they clung only to her, When she smelled the dead on her daughter's skin she felt sure something bad was coming. That she would look into her baby's eyes and see retribution looking back, but in the room there was only silence. There was only a little baby girl, born with a head of hair so full the midwife whooped when she crowned.
Amma is a debut novel by Sri Lankan Pākehā writer Saraid de Silva and won the inaugural Crystal Arts Trust Prize in 2021 before being edited and published in the UK by Weatherglass Books.
It will be available in 2024 for subscribers to Weatherglass Books (see below) and/or the Republic of Consciousness Book of the Month club.
The first three chapters introduce us to the three key matrilineal characters:
- Annie: Annie Ano Fernando (b. 1990), who we first meet in London in 2018, where she has gone in search of her uncle, Suri, of who she has no memories, him having left New Zealand for London in the early 90s
- Sithara: Maria Louisa Sithara Fernando (b. 1969), her mother and Suri's elder sister, who we first meet in Invercargill, New Zealand, a small town that thinks it is a city, at the bottom of a country full of white people who think they live in England, where she and her husband Ravi emigrated in 1978 from Sri Lanka.
- Josephina: Josephina Colette Paluvettaraiyar (b. 1941), Annie's grandmother and the titular 'Amma', who we meet in Singapore, 1951, where she lives with her parents, but largely cared for by her grandmother who is originally from Pondicherry.
de Silva currently works as a writer for a New Zealand's longest-running soap opera, and each of these chapters draws the reader into the story of the family, most dramatically in the case of Josephina who, aged just 10, is raped by the father of a potential suitor (seemingly with her parent's tacit connivance), and reacts by pushing a marble statue of Mary onto her attacker's head, killing him.
Gran killed her rapist. Somehow this is not new; it is like a song Annie is listening to decades later, remembering all of the lyrics. Gran killed her rapist because of course she did. Annie sees the three of them — Gran, Mum and herself —swimming in the same dark water.They don't cross paths, they just stay side by side, keeping their eyes locked on one another.
This is a novel of people finding their place in the world, both geographically, and in their sexuality and relationships. The story continues to alternate between the third-person perspectives of these three generations of women, moving non-linearly through time and taking Amma, and us, from Singapore, to Colombo, New Zealand (from Invercargill to Hamilton and Christchurch) and then to Melbourne, with Annie's side-trip to see Suri in London.
The violence that began Josephina's introduction to her developing sexual attractiveness to predatory men runs as a current throughout the novel, as is the theme of the three women each taking control and where needed retaliation (Josephina on her rapist; Sithara on some white youths who threaten Suri when they discover he is gay; and Annie on her errant and violent father, Paul).
But the novel's highlight is the lush, evocative prose. Distinctively the state of the characters' hair is a key motif and signaller of their moods - starting with how we are introduced to Sithara:
Maria Louisa Sithara Fernando sits on the floor of her bedroom getting ready for school. It is 7am on a frozen morning in July. Her room is lit by one bulb on a stand with no lampshade. Her hair, long enough to kiss her waist, is dead.
Back home, in Colombo, her hair was alive. It floated outwards as though underwater when she was sad, unfurling softly around her face. Sometimes it said the things that she could not. Her hair reached out to her amma when they lay down after lunch, too full and too hot to do anything other than bask like lizards on the wooden seat they called a couch and watch the ceiling fan twist slowly above them. Things have changed since she got here. Her family, herself. Both have shrunk. And when Appa died, her hair gave up.
Or from the same chapter, recalling the family's arrival in a cold, empty New Zealand:
Amma wore a jacket and a coat over a banana-yellow sari. She stuck out on the dull street like a sunflower. They had no real winter clothes. Amma stuffed a pink sarong under a sun hat as they walked here, it drooped out from the rim like big wilted petals. She let her suitcase fall to the footpath, pushed both hands deep into her sleeves and scowled.
Appa just looked at the empty roads, checked left and right as though he had missed something. His hair was like Sithara’s used to be, an extension of his thoughts, breathing. He kept it long at the top, brushed back from his face in an elegant side parting. When he was happy his curls rustled together like whispering leaves.
[...]
Sithara and Suri stood still, as paralysed as their parents, waiting for a cue. Suri’s chubby fingers held Sithara’s tight. She had to make being here okay. She tried to think of something to make Suri smile, but lost the words in surprise when she opened her mouth and saw her breath materialise in front of her. She reached out a hand, trying to touch the ghost of her thoughts.
Where are all the people? Appa said softly, as the strangeness of this place poured over them all.
This is the epitome of the great story-telling built up from beautiful sentence-making which Weatherglass Books was founded to publish - highly recommended and a book I very much hope to see on the Women's Prize for Fiction list.
The publisher
Weatherglass Books is a small independent press founded by Neil Griffiths (novelist and founder of the Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses) and Damian Lanigan (novelist and playwright).
They publish three novels a year, all of the highest literary quality, and I would highly recommend their subscription service.
Weatherglass was founded on a shared love of Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower and a shared fear that it wouldn’t find a publisher today. Weatherglass Books wants to clear a space for the next The Blue Flower.
“Running the Republic of Consciousness Prize I read hundreds of novels from small presses and loved a great many, but I did feel an absence of novels that were somehow exquisite at the simplest level: great story-telling built up from beautiful sentence-making.” Neil Griffiths, co-publisher
"We’re looking for intelligent, original, beautiful writing, and we're finding it. Additionally - maybe it's a reaction to the unhinged, fictional-seeming times we live in - we find writers trying to be truthful. It's a fascinating combination: writers who have extraordinary things to say, and are saying them with energy and style, whilst also trying to express something real and true about the world. It's bracing and exciting. It feels like the perfect time to start a literary press.” Damian Lanigan, co-publisher
March 12, 2025
This novel had a lot of potential but didn't quite land for me.
The issues were interesting and the complexities if family relationships were delved into in an intriguing way. But I think was too short and therefore I didn't connect enough with the events, issues or characters. It should have been more moving than it was, but it just moved too quickly and needed more depth.
It jumped around a lot which was a bit confusing at first. The ending was too neat and underwhelming.
The issues were interesting and the complexities if family relationships were delved into in an intriguing way. But I think was too short and therefore I didn't connect enough with the events, issues or characters. It should have been more moving than it was, but it just moved too quickly and needed more depth.
It jumped around a lot which was a bit confusing at first. The ending was too neat and underwhelming.
July 1, 2025
Loved this! The storytelling was incredible, especially the parallels drawn between the struggles faced by three generations of women. Also a very accurate portrayal of the immigrant experience. Didn’t think I would like it this much but one of my favourite books this year.
July 2, 2024
Simply beautiful and complex
June 15, 2024
Call it cultural cringe but I didn't think about picking up this great debut by a New Zealand author until I saw some British booktubers talking about it. I was silly to wait.
Amma is the story of three generations of women with Sri Lankan heritage over three different locations and timeframes - Singapore, Sri Lanka, and New Zealand. This is about finding your identity while grappling with intergenerational trauma.
While exploring intergenerational trauma is important, I could not help thinking did anything good ever happen to this family or was it just bad thing after bad thing? There's 🍇, homophobia, racism, murder, displacement, grief, domestic violence. It started to read like de Silva was on a box ticking exercise of all the ways women could experience trauma.
Despite that I raced through this book reading almost half of it while I waited for my car to be serviced. Its an excellent debut and I'll be sure not to wait to pick up what de Silva writes next.
Amma is the story of three generations of women with Sri Lankan heritage over three different locations and timeframes - Singapore, Sri Lanka, and New Zealand. This is about finding your identity while grappling with intergenerational trauma.
While exploring intergenerational trauma is important, I could not help thinking did anything good ever happen to this family or was it just bad thing after bad thing? There's 🍇, homophobia, racism, murder, displacement, grief, domestic violence. It started to read like de Silva was on a box ticking exercise of all the ways women could experience trauma.
Despite that I raced through this book reading almost half of it while I waited for my car to be serviced. Its an excellent debut and I'll be sure not to wait to pick up what de Silva writes next.
July 31, 2025
As a newly married woman who has immigrated to a new country, I miss my mother every day. This book intensified that longing.
Not "mom," but more familiarly: amma, mama, ammu, ma, mummy. These names—common in South Asian households—hold a quiet intimacy. The title alone felt instantly familiar.
Saraid de Silva’s “Amma” is a sweeping, intergenerational novel that follows three women from the Fernando family across time and continents. It begins in 1951 Singapore, where ten-year-old Josephina commits a violent act in self-defense—a trauma that quietly reverberates through the family’s emotional inheritance. In 1980s Invercargill, New Zealand, her daughter Sithara comes of age while navigating racism and domestic abuse. And in 2018, Sithara's daughter, Annie, a queer woman estranged from her mother, seeks out her uncle Suri in London to piece together the family's fractured history.
The morning after I finished the book, I sat in my office chair and cried. This is a story that makes you consider not just your mother, but all the women who came before—what they endured, what they gave, and what they couldn’t. I thought of both of my grandmothers—not because their lives paralleled the novel, but because the book reminded me of the fragility of time: the moments we shared and the ones we lost.
What I loved most about “Amma” is how it portrays motherhood as something messy, evolving, and human. De Silva doesn’t idealize mothers; she writes them as women first: with ambitions, flaws, and pasts that are often buried beneath duty. The novel gently peels back these layers with care, showing how each generation inherits both visible and invisible wounds—passed down not just through words, but through absence, gesture, and choices made in love or survival. It reminds us that our mothers and grandmothers were once young too—they made mistakes, they learned, they changed.
No summary can fully capture the emotions this book stirs. This novel is pure feeling.
Not "mom," but more familiarly: amma, mama, ammu, ma, mummy. These names—common in South Asian households—hold a quiet intimacy. The title alone felt instantly familiar.
Saraid de Silva’s “Amma” is a sweeping, intergenerational novel that follows three women from the Fernando family across time and continents. It begins in 1951 Singapore, where ten-year-old Josephina commits a violent act in self-defense—a trauma that quietly reverberates through the family’s emotional inheritance. In 1980s Invercargill, New Zealand, her daughter Sithara comes of age while navigating racism and domestic abuse. And in 2018, Sithara's daughter, Annie, a queer woman estranged from her mother, seeks out her uncle Suri in London to piece together the family's fractured history.
The morning after I finished the book, I sat in my office chair and cried. This is a story that makes you consider not just your mother, but all the women who came before—what they endured, what they gave, and what they couldn’t. I thought of both of my grandmothers—not because their lives paralleled the novel, but because the book reminded me of the fragility of time: the moments we shared and the ones we lost.
What I loved most about “Amma” is how it portrays motherhood as something messy, evolving, and human. De Silva doesn’t idealize mothers; she writes them as women first: with ambitions, flaws, and pasts that are often buried beneath duty. The novel gently peels back these layers with care, showing how each generation inherits both visible and invisible wounds—passed down not just through words, but through absence, gesture, and choices made in love or survival. It reminds us that our mothers and grandmothers were once young too—they made mistakes, they learned, they changed.
No summary can fully capture the emotions this book stirs. This novel is pure feeling.
April 12, 2025
4.5 stars!
June 14, 2025
I loved this story of three generations of women figuring things out and learning and unlearning generational hurt. It was gentle (rather than gritty) even on the tough issues but I think that worked. Author was also a masterclass in classic high school English good writing - similes, metaphors, personification galore - but again, it worked and it was never grating (hence masterclass). Also the food descriptions made me So Hungry the whole time.
November 14, 2024
The 3 I wish was 5.
Love storyline but execution lacked slightly in terms
of over conceptualizing characters every thought and emotion sort flatlined the bigger moments/ general character development.
Happy I stumbled on this while here in NZ none the less.
Love storyline but execution lacked slightly in terms
of over conceptualizing characters every thought and emotion sort flatlined the bigger moments/ general character development.
Happy I stumbled on this while here in NZ none the less.
November 7, 2024
oh my god
June 11, 2025
I really liked this book. intergenerational trauma, immigrant experience, queer identity and belonging … what more can I ask for?
January 28, 2025
Truly heartfelt ♥️
January 3, 2025
Layered and entwined, a multi generational story of 3 women’s lives, their loves, tragedies and joys. I found myself deeply immersed in this gorgeous book. Highly recommend for anyone looking to read about the experiences of new immigrants to Aotearoa, but also it dives deeply into how we deal with trauma, tragedy and family separation. There is just so much to love about this book. It’s characters will haunt you, they will sit beside you as you read about their lives and will tell you their stories with passion and heart. Loved it!
August 18, 2024
4.25⭐️ emotional and moving. A lovely debut. Took me a second to get into the first few chapters and figure out the dynamics that we’re playing out but I ended up loving the multi-generational storylines. A great read.
April 11, 2024
Such beautiful writing and story
August 25, 2024
A must read !! I’ve just bought tickets to go watch the author discuss her book.
November 5, 2024
Finished this book last night. Such a lovely book. Thank u Saraid de Silva u are a talent! Made me think lots about my nana. God bless that woman she makes a great scone
January 15, 2025
4.25 ⭐️ Wow. What a story. Was glad for the heads up that it might take a second to get my head around the characters and dynamics. Ended up loving how the three stories linked across the different family members. A deep and moving story!
May 28, 2025
An absolutely fantastic story about family, generational trauma and how the past can live with us forever. I will have some more coherent thoughts about this when I'm not so tired, but this was so so so good.
February 15, 2025
Such a well-written and captivating story. Heck of a debut, I can't wait to see what she writes next.
March 9, 2025
wonderful.... familial pain in small town nz jab me straight thru the heart
March 22, 2024
Amma (2024) by Saraid de Silva is a time-hopping, peripatetic debut novel that explores the matrilineal line of a single family over three generations. Though it chronologically runs from 1951 through 2019, de Silva presents a fractured narrative, jumping back and forward between key situations in the characters’ lives, gradually peeling away the layers of its story to reveal a tale about diaspora, family, and fitting in.
The novel opens in London, 2018, with Annie Ano Fernando, calling upon her uncle Suri who she has never met. No sooner has he opened the door, we are whisked off Invercargill in 1984, to meet a school-aged instance of Sithara, Annie’s mother. Then, following an incident there with local lads, we land in Singapore, in 1951, where the story finds its real inciting incident. Ten year old Josephina (the Amma of the title) is locked in a room with a rich Englishsman, her potential new father-in-law, who rapes her, seemingly with her parents’ tacit approval. It’s an awful and scarring moment that effectively drives the generational dynamic and the attitudes therein.
Across the decades, we may say that all human life is here, but even while weighted to the more miserable side, it never feels heavy or forced. In fact, there’s a lightness to de Salva’s prose and it’s polished enough to sparkle (“They sieve her, trying to shake out a flaw.”) while never being showy. But where the real strength comes is in the believable characters that run through its pages. Come the last page, I could happily have spent more time with them. Maybe this is because we see them all growing up, as the book hops around, and we see how their reaction to events in the past have shaped their future. But maybe just because, through good and bad, they are fully-formed and full of life.
In reading Amma, I was somewhat reminded of Jonathan Escoffery’s recent debut, If I Survive You (2022) where the younger son in an immigrant family searched for himself at the crossroads of culture and community. Amma treads similar, if less experimental ground, with its three generations experiencing difficulties fitting in, not just in terms of place but with each other.
With Annie, naive to her family’s past, she acts as a way into the broader story. Her youthful zest is at odds with those that have gone before, Her attitude to her abusive father is one-eighty to her mother’s open arms. The experience around her sexuality comes differently than to her gay uncle. But familial attitudes are ultimately driven by her gran whose own shame resonates through the bloodline directing attitudes and actions.
Overall it’s a tight storyline, with great steady-as-she-goes writing (though I occasionally got a bit disoriented with the switching timelines). Across its canvas we find people are likely to find their place in the world easier, whether that be in geography, relationships, or sexuality when acceptance is at the heart of families that move forward with neither secrets nor shame.
The novel opens in London, 2018, with Annie Ano Fernando, calling upon her uncle Suri who she has never met. No sooner has he opened the door, we are whisked off Invercargill in 1984, to meet a school-aged instance of Sithara, Annie’s mother. Then, following an incident there with local lads, we land in Singapore, in 1951, where the story finds its real inciting incident. Ten year old Josephina (the Amma of the title) is locked in a room with a rich Englishsman, her potential new father-in-law, who rapes her, seemingly with her parents’ tacit approval. It’s an awful and scarring moment that effectively drives the generational dynamic and the attitudes therein.
Across the decades, we may say that all human life is here, but even while weighted to the more miserable side, it never feels heavy or forced. In fact, there’s a lightness to de Salva’s prose and it’s polished enough to sparkle (“They sieve her, trying to shake out a flaw.”) while never being showy. But where the real strength comes is in the believable characters that run through its pages. Come the last page, I could happily have spent more time with them. Maybe this is because we see them all growing up, as the book hops around, and we see how their reaction to events in the past have shaped their future. But maybe just because, through good and bad, they are fully-formed and full of life.
In reading Amma, I was somewhat reminded of Jonathan Escoffery’s recent debut, If I Survive You (2022) where the younger son in an immigrant family searched for himself at the crossroads of culture and community. Amma treads similar, if less experimental ground, with its three generations experiencing difficulties fitting in, not just in terms of place but with each other.
With Annie, naive to her family’s past, she acts as a way into the broader story. Her youthful zest is at odds with those that have gone before, Her attitude to her abusive father is one-eighty to her mother’s open arms. The experience around her sexuality comes differently than to her gay uncle. But familial attitudes are ultimately driven by her gran whose own shame resonates through the bloodline directing attitudes and actions.
Overall it’s a tight storyline, with great steady-as-she-goes writing (though I occasionally got a bit disoriented with the switching timelines). Across its canvas we find people are likely to find their place in the world easier, whether that be in geography, relationships, or sexuality when acceptance is at the heart of families that move forward with neither secrets nor shame.
May 26, 2025
”[…] that loving someone for a very long time is always joy and devastation, that the existence of one doesn’t disprove the other.”
is it dramatic to say that reading amma feels first like a homecoming, then like being unraveled, and finally like a revelation? books about generational trauma and the struggle of being queer in an immigrant family are my kryptonite so that was to be expected, but this surpassed my expectations and then some. familial relationships are fraught enough as is; the older you become the more endlessly taut those cords of tension seem to become. you have a choice, then, at a certain point: to cut and suffer the consequences, or to suffer the ordeal of easing that tension yourself. who’s to say which is easier?
cried so much i feel like a shriveled up raisin, but for all the sorrow in the pages of this book, they were suffused in equal parts with blinding, blistering hope.
5 stars ♡
December 19, 2024
Saraid de Silva, you built worlds inside worlds with this one. Devastating, visceral + saturated in love. AMMA is an outstanding debut, and you’re right, it really is so sweet to watch women live at the edge of themselves.
November 11, 2024
Three generations colonial revenge narrative. A lot of trauma.
December 15, 2024
Every chapter was so sad and so beautiful and also made me homesick reading from far far away why am I crying in the club right now
December 24, 2024
Stunner.
December 30, 2024
In hysterics on the plane. I miss my grandma so so much.
January 2, 2025
Couldn’t put it down and finished in one day!
June 9, 2025
***1/2
"I have a tale to tell
Sometimes it gets so hard to hide it well
I was not ready for the fall
Too blind to see the writing on the wall"
( Live to tell - Madonna)
Read the novel, "Amma", by Saraid de Silva. While the title means mother in my native Sinhalese, the same word is being used by many other languages, especially Dravidian, and with less common use in Hindi. Amma is one of the three main female characters in this novel, who has the most impact, positive and negative, on her children, and grand children.
The novel sees the main characters, at different stages of their lives in various places - Singapore in its infancy, Sri Lanka just before things started to go awfully wrong with her ethnic strife, several cities in New Zealand at a time still unused to Asians in the 1980s and hence less tolerant, as well as in the better subsequent decades, and finally Melbourne and London at the end of the 2010s. However the books' final chapter takes place in Colombo, as a mother and daughter rebuild their damaged relationship.
All three female characters undergo a lot - be it rape, abuse, mistreatment due to sexuality, disappointments over children, and death of their loved ones. As the world changes its stance on people who are different, their treatment towards children, parental expectations of their children, we see these three main female characters functioning in the turmoil of the world. The book ends in a relative calm, as the two remaining female characters make amends and come to terms with their lot, and rebuild broken relationships. One could say that the theme of 'woke' is a consistently present one in this book, but it also include the painful path that the marginalised groups had to endure, to reach where they presently are.
I felt that this book included probably more than its fair share of strife and grief, so much so that it sometimes felt like a condensation of it. Yet who am I to say that there aren't people who have endured so much pain, loss, and grief over their short lives ? Probably I am somewhat opinionated since I've read novels in which the authors try to bring in all forms of grief into their short narration, affecting its level of conviction. Upon reflection, on completing the novel I am now of the opinion that this is not that kind of artificial piling up of grief on a few hundred pages, but the author probably had a tale to tell of her own, inspired at least partially by her own relations.
The authors' form of jumping from one period to another, at times across many decades, might not be doing the book justice given the extreme incidents that the characters endure.
"I have a tale to tell
Sometimes it gets so hard to hide it well
I was not ready for the fall
Too blind to see the writing on the wall"
( Live to tell - Madonna)
Read the novel, "Amma", by Saraid de Silva. While the title means mother in my native Sinhalese, the same word is being used by many other languages, especially Dravidian, and with less common use in Hindi. Amma is one of the three main female characters in this novel, who has the most impact, positive and negative, on her children, and grand children.
The novel sees the main characters, at different stages of their lives in various places - Singapore in its infancy, Sri Lanka just before things started to go awfully wrong with her ethnic strife, several cities in New Zealand at a time still unused to Asians in the 1980s and hence less tolerant, as well as in the better subsequent decades, and finally Melbourne and London at the end of the 2010s. However the books' final chapter takes place in Colombo, as a mother and daughter rebuild their damaged relationship.
All three female characters undergo a lot - be it rape, abuse, mistreatment due to sexuality, disappointments over children, and death of their loved ones. As the world changes its stance on people who are different, their treatment towards children, parental expectations of their children, we see these three main female characters functioning in the turmoil of the world. The book ends in a relative calm, as the two remaining female characters make amends and come to terms with their lot, and rebuild broken relationships. One could say that the theme of 'woke' is a consistently present one in this book, but it also include the painful path that the marginalised groups had to endure, to reach where they presently are.
I felt that this book included probably more than its fair share of strife and grief, so much so that it sometimes felt like a condensation of it. Yet who am I to say that there aren't people who have endured so much pain, loss, and grief over their short lives ? Probably I am somewhat opinionated since I've read novels in which the authors try to bring in all forms of grief into their short narration, affecting its level of conviction. Upon reflection, on completing the novel I am now of the opinion that this is not that kind of artificial piling up of grief on a few hundred pages, but the author probably had a tale to tell of her own, inspired at least partially by her own relations.
The authors' form of jumping from one period to another, at times across many decades, might not be doing the book justice given the extreme incidents that the characters endure.
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