Wave: Writing about the unimaginable

Grief stalks the first written story known to the world, The Epic of Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh, the hero, must lose his closest friend, Enkidu. There is nothing they can do to stave off his death, despite the many battles they have fought together.

Enkidu rushes into anger. He reproaches the friend who has abandoned him by not being able to follow him: "You did not rescue me, you were afraid and did not." Gilgamesh mourns, and, finally, he journeys into the endless night of the Netherworld, to ask about Death and Life - "dense was the darkness ... it licked at his face." And yet his need to understand takes him through the darkness to whatever lies on the other side.

If the old, great tales from Gilgamesh to the Odyssey and the Mahabharata are reminders that grief and loss are part of the human experience, Sonali Deraniyagala's Wave strips away the immunity we develop to stories of wrenching sadness. Nothing you read this year will move you more deeply than this book.

In 2004, Ms Deraniyagala and her family came from London to holiday at Sri Lanka's Yala National Park. The day after Christmas, Ms Deraniyagala stood in the doorway of her room, chatting with her friend Orlantha, and noticed that the ocean seemed closer to the hotel than usual.

In the next few hours, everything she held closest to her heart would be lost. The waves build; she calls her husband, Steve, to come out. They and their two boys make it to a jeep driven by a friend - Steve holds Vik, she holds Mal. Her parents are left behind. Orlantha's mother falls out; Orlantha's father, Anton, gets off to look for his wife. Then the jeep starts off, and then the water is upon them. Ms Deraniyagala remembers the jeep overturning, a look of terror on Steve's face, the rush of the brown, filthy water, a flock of storks in the sky. She would hear the word "tsunami" only much later, along with the word "Mahasona" - the demon of graveyards.

When she is found by a group of men - in her recollection at the time, she is curled up in the mud, clasping her knees - the list of losses is unthinkable, beyond her mind's reach. Steve, her sons Vikram and Malli, her parents - the five people she loves most in the world - are dead. Orlantha, her friend, and her friend's mother are gone, too. Ms Deraniyagala does not want to know any of this; when a truck comes in, carrying bodies, to be met with an "unending, rising, screaming scream", her voice is not raised along with the voices of the others who have suffered loss.

Her honesty is pitiless. A plump boy wanders around, dazed, sobbing, and she thinks: "You stayed alive in that water because you are so fucking fat. Vik and Malli didn't have a chance. Just shut up." When she recognises guests from the hotel who have survived, she thinks: "Why are they alive, surely the wave should have got them as well. Why aren't they dead?"

This is grief, not the salt tears of our imagination, but the reality Ms Deraniyagala describes. Her friends keep a vigil on her; she slashes her arms with a butter knife, she burns her skin with cigarettes, she hoards sleeping pills, thinking only that she must kill herself. She becomes for a period a steadily suicidal drinker. For the Dutch tenants of the house her parents lived in, she becomes an angry ghost, driving recklessly in and out of their lives, ringing the doorbell, leaving blank calls. "All that was reasonable in this world had been blasted by that wave," she writes.

Memory has its limits; the men who rescued her tell her later that when she was found, she was spinning around and around in the mud. "It still seems far-fetched, even to me," she writes in her precise, unornamented prose. "Everyone vanishing in an instant, me spinning out from that mud, what is this, some kind of myth?"

We know nothing about Steve, Vik and Malli when Wave begins, but slowly, their shapes emerge. This is treacherous terrain - the world is filled with triggers, Tesco Ready Salted Chips, Coltrane and a child's T-shirt as deadly as landmines. In order to capture them, Ms Deraniyagala must reach behind the barbed wire fence of memory, walk through the tripwires that lurk in even a blade of grass that her sons might have walked on. She walks through the darkness, until they are vivid on the page: Stephen Lissenburgh, Vikram Lissenburgh, Nikhil Lissenburgh, and the one left behind, Mummy Lissenburgh.

Wave offers no easy redemptions, no empty platitudes. In New York, Ms Deraniyagala finally finds the distance from which she can reach for her family. "For I am not whirling any more, I am no longer cradled by shock." How do you cope with the loss of everything you once loved most in the world? She has few comfortable answers; just the honesty of this extraordinary book.

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