Caroline Moorehead
Into the Deep
Wave: A Memoir of Life after the Tsunami
By Sonali Deraniyagala
Virago 184pp £9.99
No one who saw the pictures will ever forget the tsunami breaking over the shores of the Indian Ocean on Boxing Day 2004, uprooting trees, toppling buildings and pounding to death those caught in its wake. One of the survivors was a young economist called Sonali Deraniyagala, whose entire family was among the almost quarter of a million people who died. Wave, written eight years after the event, is a memoir about what it means to survive.
Deraniyagala, her husband, Steve, their two sons, eight-year-old Vikram and five-year-old Malli, and her parents were packing up to leave the resort of Yala, a national park on the southeastern coast of Sri Lanka where they had spent many happy holidays, when she happened to look out of the hotel
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
In 1524, hundreds of thousands of peasants across Germany took up arms against their social superiors.
Peter Marshall investigates the causes and consequences of the German Peasants’ War, the largest uprising in Europe before the French Revolution.
Peter Marshall - Down with the Ox Tax!
Peter Marshall: Down with the Ox Tax! - Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants’ War by Lyndal Roper
literaryreview.co.uk
The Soviet double agent Oleg Gordievsky, who died yesterday, reviewed many books on Russia & spying for our pages. As he lived under threat of assassination, books had to be sent to him under ever-changing pseudonyms. Here are a selection of his pieces:
Literary Review - For People Who Devour Books
Book reviews by Oleg Gordievsky
literaryreview.co.uk
The Soviet Union might seem the last place that the art duo Gilbert & George would achieve success. Yet as the communist regime collapsed, that’s precisely what happened.
@StephenSmithWDS wonders how two East End gadflies infiltrated the Eastern Bloc.
Stephen Smith - From Russia with Lucre
Stephen Smith: From Russia with Lucre - Gilbert & George and the Communists by James Birch
literaryreview.co.uk