Painful and poignant, this story will break over you like a wave.

This is the most incredible true story I've ever heard. I actually did "hear" it because I downloaded the audio book. I highly recommend this over reading it because it's just like having the author sitting right there (although it's not actually the author's voice).
All the different phases of grief that she went through and the order of dealing with each loss: first her boys, then her husband, and then her parents. You will be changed by this book and appreciate your own relationships even more.

This book will break your heart.

Difficult to read at times. So tragic. The depth of her pain was really difficult to get through, but as she began to recover the tone of the book changed. I cannot imagine surviving, let alone writing a book about it. Best wishes to her.

The parts about what the author experienced during the tsunami really held my interest. Most of the book was about flashbacks to memories with her husband and kids that were too difficult for her to internalize. While I sympathize with her extreme anger and terror of revisiting anything connected with her happy past, I couldn't read the entire book through. I found that her anger in particular was too negative for me. Had I gone through such an experience or had similar depth of loss, I can see how I would identify with many of the memories she recreated. But I haven't, and for me the amount of negativity that stays with me after reading such depressing stories is too much. I hope she finds her way back to happiness.

Personal narrative from a survivor of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Very thought provoking.

Personal narrative from a survivor of the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami. Very thought provoking.

Sonali Deraniyagala was vacationing with her family in Sri Lanka's Yala National Park on Christmas, 2004, when the deadliest tsunami in history killed her parents, husband, and two young sons in a single instant. It's a story so unfathomable that, even nine years later, Deraniyagala herself can hardly believe it happened to her. What she's finally shared in Wave is a brief account that is both shocking and — terribly, somehow — beautiful. She unsentimentally excavates all the ugly crevices of her grief. By opening up about the horror that swallowed her entire family, Deraniyagala has in some small, shadowy way created a space for Steve, Vikram, Mali, and her parents to live on. It is, in a word, astonishing.

This book is haunting. It has been said that time heals all wounds, and indeed, for this woman, time did begin to heal her wounds. But the loss, and that process, is the stuff of a real-life, hell on earth. I'm glad I read it because I believe her family, who are all dead, deserve to be read about and remembered.

Wave is a courageous and difficult memoir that follows the author in the months and years following the tsunami that his Sri Lanka on December 26, 2004. She captures her agonizing desperation as her world fractures and explodes with the loss of her parents, sons, husband and best friend in the disaster.
As she remembers the tsunami's terrible aftermath, her words draw us into the waves of her grief, the state of her mind, the confusion, disorientation and rage. The narrative moves slowly and with difficulty through her journey to remember, to grieve, to let go and to heal as she re-discovers the places and people in which her family remains embedded. Wave captures the slow growth of a lost and re-discovered life.