Novel
Choir of Hatred
Meet the Rubber Ducks. A mercenary company fighting to stay alive, make payroll - except there's a very big problem: reality keeps getting in their way.
Novel
The Wretched and the Damned
A group of superpowered malcontents take down the corrupt, nepotistic government of Sri Lanka.
Overview
Power corrupts, revolution demands sacrifice and the line between hero and monster blurs.
In the shadows of Colombo, a war is brewing. Decades of dynasty politics, corruption, and social stratification have paved the way for the Kodithuwakku family’s suffocating rule. Beneath the surface of Colombo’s elite circles, the Karaawa unleash a plan. Led by the enigmatic Thanthri, they weaponize finance, technology, and their own extraordinary talents to orchestrate a nation’s downfall, hoping to rebuild it from the ashes. But in a country built on secrets and betrayals, can even superheroes save themselves from the darkness they battle?
‘The Wretched and the Damned’ explores power, systemic rot, and the terrifying cost of revolution in a nation perpetually at war with itself; and the human toll of wielding godlike abilities in a fight for a nation’s soul.
WINNER OF THE GRATIAEN PRIZE 2023.
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Behind the Scenes
Hot off the Salvage Crew’s success, I sat down to deliver on the other stuff I was supposed to be writing - Pilgrim Machines, and the last Commonwealth Empires book. I couldn’t. Not until this made its way out.
I had always told myself that I would not write about Sri Lanka in my fiction. My work at Watchdog seemed like enough writing about Sri Lanka; my fiction was a place to enjoy myself, to get away from the mass graves and government crackdowns for a little while.
W&D made me break that rule. I had, as I noted in the foreword, been spending far too much time examining the exact ways in which Sri Lanka could fall apart. This came in handy for our research at Watchdog, but before it did, everything coalesced into this book - in 2021.
Writing it was a bizarre experience. On a technical level I was trying to push my ability with the first person form; so, defying common sense, the book has eight (or more) first-person narrators. This made for good experience by the time I sat down to write Pilgrim Machines, but at the time it felt like an act of induced schizophrenia. On some days the words came as if by compulsion; on others what came through was a terrible nihilism.
Getting it out was just as bizarre. As a fundamentally Sri Lankan book, it fell into that awkward category of “this is impossible to sell outside Sri Lanka”. I then decided to put it out over email, chapter by chapter; that worked until Elon Musk bought Twitter, which owned the email service I was using (Revue); and the newsletter vanished.
And Sri Lanka collapsed in 2022 - in nearly the exact way I was expecting it to.
Profoundly irritated and with nothing else to do with the manuscript, I threw it at the Gratiaen Prize, Sri Lanka’s most prestigious English writing award - and it won, in 2023. There are two articles in the immediate aftermath that add more context: one from the Morning and the other on the Sunday Times.
Perera Hussein took it on, and as a result we have this beautiful book - on 2025.
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