Book

THE SEASONS OF TROUBLE: Life Amid the Ruins of Sri Lanka's Civil War (Oct 2014, Verso UK/US, Harper Collins India) is a literary nonfiction narrative that follows three people for 5 years during the end and aftermath of the Sri Lankan civil war.

US & UK cover - Verso

India & Sri Lanka cover - Harper Collins

 

Verso Paperback UK & US

Winner of the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize 2015, and the Tata Lit Live First Book (Nonfiction) Award 2015

"Poetic... thoroughly absorbing." 
The Economist        

"Mohan combines years of superb journalism with a novelist's touch... vividly brutal and beautiful." 
Guernica     

"Intense and powerful, engrossing and engaging... touches as well as unsettles the heart." 
The Mint    

"A Kafkaesque story of survival in a society riven by ethnic tensions and mutual distrust"
Times Literary Supplement       

"Gripping and profoundly moving,.. an astonishing feat of reportage" 
NPR's Best of 2014     ​ 

"A remarkable feat of empathy" 
Slate's Overlooked Books of 2014       

"Mohan captures a country of dueling narratives as irreconcilable as those of the Palestinians and the Israelis, of suspicions and betrayals instigated by an all-powerful security apparatus.” 
New York Review of Books      

"A penetrating account" 
LA Review of Books    

"Vivid... the prose is unflinchingly precise" 
The Hindu Business Line
 
“...breathtakingly well-told. By focusing on the lives of three Tamils and telling their stories in novelistic detail, Mohan has revealed a modern tragedy of truly epic proportions. Haunting and unforgettable.” 
Jon Lee Anderson, staff writer at The New Yorker     
 
"Seasons of Trouble, though non-fiction, does what novels do best: it allows us into the hearts and minds of people who might be very different from us, but with whom we come to have a great empathy through inhabiting their lives." 
Shyam Selvadurai, author of Funny Boy     

A podcast with Sources & Methods, and an interview with Guernica on the research and writing of the book. Read an excerpt here and here.

About the book: 

For three decades, Sri Lanka’s civil war tore communities apart. In 2009, the Sri Lankan army finally defeated the separatist Tamil Tigers guerrillas in a fierce battle that swept up about 300,000 civilians and killed more than 40,000.a More than a million had been displaced by the conflict, and the resilient among them still dared to hope. But the next five years changed everything.

The Seasons of Trouble: Life Amid the Ruins of Sri Lanka's Civil War, an account of three lives caught up in the devastation, looks beyond the heroism of wartime survival to reveal the creeping violence of the everyday. When city-bred Sarva is dragged off the streets by state forces, his middle-aged mother, Indra, searches for him through the labyrinthine Sri Lankan bureaucracy. Meanwhile, Mugil, a former child soldier, deserts the Tigers in the thick of war to protect her family.

Having survived, they struggle to live as the Sri Lankan state continues to attack minority Tamils and Muslims, frittering away the era of peace. Sarva flees the country, losing his way—and almost his life—in a bid for asylum. Mugil stays, breaking out of the refugee camp to rebuild her family and an ordinary life in the village she left as a girl. But in her tumultuous world, desires, plans, and people can be snatched away in a moment.