Description
Book SynopsisA Long Watch offers a story of human complexity amid entrenched narratives of Sri Lanka's long civil war. Pulled from a dark ocean after a battle at sea, Commodore Boyagoda became the highest-ranking prisoner detained by the Tamil Tigers. For eight years, he lived at close quarters with his declared enemy, his imprisonment punctuated by high-level talks about his fate, but also by extended conversations with his jailers and scratch games of badminton played in jungle clearings. Throughout, he observed his captors and fellow prisoners acutely, and with discreet empathy for the lives of others undone by war.A memoir retold in Ajith Boyagoda's temperate voice, his is an unblinking relation of experiences difficult, moving and ironic. From going to sea, to war, imprisonment and eventual homecoming, he accepted successive realities as ordinary, in order to survive them.
Trade Review'The best book yet on the war in Sri Lanka [...] It is subtle and intimate, human and generous. The author has distilled conversations about that period into a remarkable book. It is brilliant.' * Michael Ondaatje, author of The English Patient *
'The only prisoner memoir to have emerged thus far from Sri Lanka's ill-prosecuted quarter-century-long domestic conflict, A Long Watch is an informative and important contribution to an underwritten subject, most particularly because Boyagoda unashamedly rejects the 'ruthless terrorist' narrative his countrymen might well have expected him to uphold.' * The Spectator *
'A deeply nuanced, non-sensational book: it is bold, yet tender [...] an invaluable, close-up account of the ways in which those who fight in these wars survive and don't survive.' * Sonali Deraniyagala, author of Wave: A Memoir of Life after the Tsunami *
'Clear, vivid, and elegant, without a trace of either false heroics or self-pity.' * Michael Frayn *
