At the Water's Edge

by Pradeep Jeganathan

Assured and accomplished, Pradeep Jeganathan's long awaited debut collection of short fiction is a spare, controlled meditation on the details of inhabitation: power and inequality, friendship and enmity, love and loss, violence and its memories. The seven interconnected stories span a near thirty years of his county's recent past; each traces a delicately textured frame of troubling, telling beauty, weaving together, with almost incredible economy, not the often composed image of Sri Lanka - a paradise isle where 'only man is vile' - but a life world, live and remembered, to be lived in again.

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories

128 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2004

Reviews

[Patricia]

The short stories gave glimpes of life in Sri Lanka from various walks of life.

[mm]

Lovely collection of short stories, some of them linked, others not, encapsulating life in modern Sri Lanka.
Not exactly white-washed but it doesn't delve into the atrocities of the civil war but still gives us a sense of the danger and loss of the period.
I felt the last story – At the Water's Edge – was the least strong of the collection.
Would love to read more by this author.

[olivia]

Tender and poignant. A lesson for outsiders, and a relatable text for many Diasporas. Beautifully written, honest, imaginative — highly recommend.

[SanjeeB]

No matter through which lense one looks at the situation in Sri Lanka, it is, for a lack of a better word, sad. Jeganathan's short stories portray this reality in vivid and heart-breaking colors, continuely astounding me as to how capable human beings are of inflicting pain on each other in the name of power, religion, color and ethnicity. I very much enjoyed the way one meets the same characters in different situations, and the connectivity of the stories. Wonderful!! A must read!!

[Stephanie Holladay]

Such a beautiful writer with such an engaging and heartbreaking topic who makes me want to cry and start saving the world at the same time.