A passenger on a road journey is in the hands of a driver; a reader embarking on a book is in the hands of a narrator.

In London, I discovered a peculiar building by Holland Park where the globe was shrunk to fit a British perspective, but which had a library with Sri Lankan books I had never seen before.

In the sense that writing is to retrieve the past and stop the passing of time, all writing is about loss. It's not nostalgia in the sense of yearning to bring back the past, but recognition of the erosion of things as you live.

In writing, I try to find the right balance between momentum and infinity, truth and beauty.

Sri Lankans of every kind, overwhelmingly the poorest, have been bombed by one side or the other for decades.

To come to England in the 1970s was to return to this strange other-world of half-known history. I found the imperial architecture curiously familiar: the post office, the town hall, the botanic gardens.