Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala

I chose this book for my book club this summer, mainly because I wanted to read it myself and decided that I was going to drag others along on what was guaranteed to be a difficult read. The first response I got, long before the meeting, was "Why on earth would you choose this book for us. It's terrible!" And by terrible, the reader/commenter meant not that it wasn't well written but that it was horrific to be reading about the sudden, unexpected, and gut wrenching deaths of almost an entire family and the subsequent grief and despair of the lone survivor, daughter, wife, mother. Luckily this reader kept pushing through and ultimately appreciated the book and we all went on to have a deep, if somber, discussion.

In 2004, economist Sonali Deraniyagala was on holiday in Sri Lanka with her husband and their two school aged sons, spending Christmas with her parents at a seaside resort she'd been visiting since she was a child growing up in the country, when in an instant everything changed. As Deraniyagala stood and watched, a tumbling white wave came rushing toward their room. She and her husband grabbed both of their boys and ran, finding a Jeep to climb into to try and escape the onslaught of the ocean. But the Jeep couldn't outrun the wave and it was upended, with Deraniyagala losing sight of her family while fighting for her own life. Miraculously surviving the tsunami and in shock, she then faced the darkest time of her entire life, fearing and then knowing for sure that Steve, their boys Vik and Malli, and both of her parents were missing and had lost their lives while she had not.

This memoir is not just the account of the terrible wave that swept into her life and devastated it, but also of the aftermath, of her desperate madness, the overwhelming desire for her own death, the stark grief she suffered, and her own soul stripped bare. She shied away from looking too closely at such an all-encompassing loss until she could no longer avoid it, protecting her mind from the personal remembrances that could derail her, and yet she had to go on living, go on in a world without her most beloved people in it. She writes beautifully and movingly of the natural world, shares the intense and harrowing feelings that grief engendered in her, and gives glimpses of who her husband, her sons, and her parents were and how she continues to navigate a world without them so many years on from her loss. The book is raw and unfiltered, emotional and crushing. It is also a powerful testament to love.