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The second novel from the Sri Lankan Australian writer Ayesha Inoon begins on a boat on the open ocean. After a Tamil militant organisation orders seven-year-old Janu and her family to leave their home in Jaffna, the capital city of Sri Lanka’s Northern Province, they are forced to flee, crossing the Indian Ocean to Australia in the hopes of a safer life. To Janu, the novel’s central character, it seems as though the journey will never end.

When their mother dies on the boat, Janu and her two younger sisters are separated from one another, each informally adopted by different adults aboard. Although the catalyst for the plot is the Sri Lankan civil war, the novel is set largely in Australia, and centres around the personal lives of Janu and her sisters, as well as on the wider Sri Lankan community in Australia.

Maryam, the youngest, has always known she was adopted, “chosen” and loved. “Too little to know what she had lost and what she had gained”, as a baby she’s “the luckiest of the three”. But as an adult, she wilts in her controlling marriage, and struggles to express herself.

Samar, the middle child, believes herself to be the biological daughter of Huda, the young mother who adopted her. Though her mother speaks with her in Tamil, teaches her the right spices to cook with, dresses her in Sri Lankan fashion, Samar often feels like the black sheep of the family. Nevertheless, she knows that she is loved.

But Janu, the eldest, is eight when she is taken to Australia – old enough to remember the life and the family she used to have. She’s adopted by a man who has no family, no children, and a different religious background. And at his hands, Janu endures 18 years of sexual abuse.

Told through alternating perspectives of Janu, Samar, Maryam and Huda, the story explores what happens after Janu finds a way to freedom. As their lives unfold, the sisters channel pain into their own unique strengths, and eventually find their way back to one another.

Maryam has a gift for words, always able to find the right fit. Samar begins dancing; it’s “the way she let[s] life express itself through her”. But Janu, the eldest, has something more. She can see the past, and flashes of the future. She knows what people’s lives will become.

Drawn to the South Coast of New South Wales, Janu sets up a seaside shop – “Serendib”, after the ancient Persian name for Sri Lanka – where, she hopes, people will come to find love and healing. And from where, perhaps, she might be able to find her sisters.

Though some of the themes of this book are very dark, the finer points are rarely given in any detail. “Where there was darkness, [Janu] also saw light … she tried to balance those, to always give hope,” Inoon writes. The book itself follows this path, an approach which makes for an easily digestible and often uplifting story, but it also leaves some of the novel’s more confronting scenes underexplored. Extreme and violent moments, including child sexual assault, domestic violence and the trauma of war, are glossed over to make way for saccharine descriptions of Janu’s beachside shop and unfolding romance, somewhat undermining their emotional significance. This isn’t the book for readers looking for in-depth engagement with politics or history; The Sisters of Serendib is a book about finding hope, not a book about the past.

The characters that populate this book are many and varied, and as Janu and her sisters are drawn together, we see the ways in which gender and culture shape their experiences of migration, family and belonging. Although men loom large in this novel – some violent, some controlling, some loving – the focus of the story is on three women who are carving out lives in the spaces available to them, and finding safety in each other’s arms. Inoon is at her best when exploring social ties of obligation, culture and power, and the ways in which they bind people together and tear them apart.

While the novel’s treatment of suffering can feel glib, its optimism is sincere and often moving. The Sisters of Serendib may not satisfy readers looking for a nuanced exploration of war or trauma, but it succeeds as a compassionate story of community and the bloom of new life.