In Noontide Toll, middle-aged van driver Vasantha reflects on his encounters with tourists and travellers as he ferries them around the island of Sri Lanka.
Vasantha is a thoughtful, inevitably desensitised soul and gentle narrator in a war-weary land which had then been devastated further by the Boxing Day tsunami.
Travellers in his batik-curtained van come from myriad backgrounds, and Vasantha realises success lies only in observing them and placating their demands.
He meets sadistic army commanders who masquerade as gentlemen, British researchers of the colonial legacy, westernised emigrants trialling post-war returns, and many others all brutalised by the civil war.
In these short tales are glimpses into the country's tragic and complex history: we travel past bomb sites and refugee camps; through a ''wounded country [where] even the sky bleeds every evening'' and every road seems to lead to a hospital.
Gunesekera's writing is mesmerising and understated.
It is left to the reader to gather up the shreds of the country's past and suggest some present-day unity.
• Jessie Neilson is a University of Otago library assistant.
