Sri Lanka in the seventies; a country on the edge.

Beneath the surface of a tropical paradise, corruption festers, tensions simmer, and a society is quietly fracturing – setting the stage for a civil war that will scar a generation.

In a quiet Colombo suburb, a teenage boy named Saman falls in love for the first time. Her name is Savi. In another time, it might have been a simple story. But nothing about this moment in Sri Lanka is simple.

The Song of the Distant Waves is a tender, nostalgic portrait of middle-class Sri Lankan life – humorous and heartbreaking in equal measure, drenched in the colour and heat of the tropics. It moves so fluidly between memory and imagination that even those who lived through this era will find it hard to separate fact from fiction.

A story as beautiful and restless as the ocean it’s named for.

Sunil Tantirige is the author of The House of a Thousand Memories (2019). He lives in Toronto with his family.