Luloff is a great storyteller. She weaves several stories of Sri Lankan families together that show the complexities of a country being torn by war. The stories with international volunteers give us glimpses into the challenges, mixed emotions or intentions that may motivate individuals who go into countries torn by civil war. ( )

These loosely connected stories of Sri Lanka are mostly undated, but they seem to be set in the 1970s to early 1980s. The stories explore all areas of the island nation, including the capital city, coastal towns in the southern part of the country, towns in the interior, and towns in the north where civil war is brewing. American Peace Corps workers and international aid workers feature in many of the stories in the first half of the book. The Americans are absent from the last few stories in the collection. All of the stories share themes of loneliness, cultural barriers, and class or status differences. The stories are individually strong, yet the collection lacks something. Civil war looms in the background, yet the stories skirt the issues central to the war. It seems as if the author has deliberately avoided the political issues that resulted in war. That might work for a well-known conflict like the Vietnam War, but most American readers will have little familiarity with Sri Lanka's civil war. ( )

I read The Beach at Galle Road: Stories, knowing that the author had been a Peace Corp volunteer in Sri Lanka. Her experiences come through the authentic characters and their stories. The book is a bit tedious to read but I decided that was partly because the author wanted readers to understand the complexities of life and politics in Sri Lanka through events that her characters struggle through, especially the constant unknowns. An excellent book of place. ( )

This is a beautiful, atmospheric collection of interconnected stories set in Sri Lanka. I was inspired to request the book because I had a friend from a foreign service family who was born and raised all over Asia. When I asked her what her favorite country was she said Sri Lanka without hesitation, even though the civil war was raging. I knew almost nothing of the country besides seeing the movie The Terrorist, which I recommend. This is not a book that propels you along, but each story grabs you in its own way. The stories center on the inner voices of ordinary people, both foreign and domestic, and as such create an intimate perspective of everyday lives on the verge of seismic change. I would say take a long afternoon and let yourself be immersed in this exotic, hopeful and tragic world. ( )

Here Luloff gives us a collection of loosely interconnected stories set in Sri Lanka that can either stand alone or be read as a single piece. The wide variety of protagonists (including old women, young mothers, teenage girls, little boys, adult men, and young American men and women serving in the Peace Corp in Sri Lanka) adds variety and depth to the book, but a theme of isolation, longing, and regret ties the wildly different lives of our different narrators together.

[full review here: http://spacebeer.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-beach-at-galle-road-stories-from.html ] ( )

The Beach At Galle Road by Joanne Luloff is a collection of stories that can stand alone but are also interconnected. They are told from the viewpoint of people, young and old,who are observers of the conflict that is the civil war fought in Sri Lanka. Each story is personal, creating a passionate re-telling because it is the little things, and not the headlines that make up the reality of war for those involved in them.

Because the stories are interconnected, the book has a sense of continuity that adds to the feeling that the reader is submerged in the lives of the people who frequent Galle Road, using it to travel away from, and into the village.

I enjoyed this book immensely and would strongly recommend it. The writing is moving and unobtrusive, you find yourself swept up in the lives of the characters and you are touched by the simple, ordinary things that make up their lives as they live under the threat of war.
Edit | More ( )

Happy families, with bright, live-wire teenage daughters and cricket-mad sons, suffer and become obliterated in Sri Lanka’s endless civil war. The usual family aspirations of university educations and good marriages evaporate as war's mayhem sweeps the island.

Joanna Luloff’s "The Beach at Galle Road" is a series of linked short pieces that one can read as a unified novel. That is certainly the effect Ms. Luloff achieves as the last few stories conclude what is a harrowing story of loss.

The eponymous road, which runs parallel to a beach, becomes a metaphor for risk and change as we read of the sister of a central character driven to madness by her husband’s bizarre need to shame and abandon her. Shame arises from strict societal mores throughout this collection, but these concerns begin to fade as the stories shift to the Tamil population, which bears the brunt of depredation on all sides: war from the government side, and purges from the rebellious Tamil side. The issues escalate to life and death as boys are whisked off to the fighting and their mothers turn up dead and floating in the river.

One theme deals with Westerners who have come to Sri Lanka, volunteering to teach or tend to the sick. The local customs and strictures baffle them, just as their behavior shocks the locals. This idea dominates the earlier stories, but the shift to the Tamil side of the conflict leads to loss, starvation, child combatants, and suicide in a smooth and well-executed swing in the stories.

This collection touches us because we know all too well of the loss and madness of war. These truths are brought home to us in this memorable and very honest collection.

http://bassoprofundo1.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-beach-at-galle-road-by-joanna-lul... ( )

The Beach at Galle Road introduces us to Sri Lanka, giving us acces through the hearts and minds of both native Sri Lankans and the international volunteers living in the country. Joanna Luloff's beautiful linked stories show us tensions inherent in what cannot be said between family and friends and what should not be said between strangers. ( )

I find it interesting to read novels set in different places in the world. This one contains a group of individual biographies of fictional characters set in Sri Lanka amid pressures of civil war. Normally I don't tend to read what might be called "collections" of short stories, but I found this an interesting and captivating look at Luloff's characters. The last characters are somewhat tragic, but the message is clear and revenge can be somewhat sweet in its own way.

This book was an Early Reviewer copy sent by the publisher in exchange for an honest review. ( )

This series of interconnected stories is set in Sri Lanka during the civil war of the nineteens eighties. It starts off in the South of the island nation with a family taking in a Peace Corps worker as a boarder. That boarder leaves and then a male named Sam comes. Sam is the first character that connects the rest. No, they are not all Americans who have stories to tell. The Sri Lankans are just as lonely.

Loneliness pervades these stories. The Peace Corps workers come to find purpose to their boring mundane lives of plenty, but the locals are just as lonely. Learning English is important for one to have an opportunity to leave the village, but war comes and takes away lives and dreams. Some Americans stay, but the reader never learns the fate of any except Lena. The last stories focus on the girl Sam liked.

Nilanthi loses everything and tries to kill herself. This does not work and she finds herself married to her dad's best friend. She lives with ghosts and the last stories made me cry.

I liked what I read. For some people that I know there maybe too much sexual innuendo. My personal problem comes with dating the storylines. If the war started somewhere between 1983 and 1987 then the stories should have taken place between 1997 and 2000. I got the distinct impression that some of these stories were placed in 1987 and that I found confusing. I prefer the settings of the stories I read to have a logical flow and this one did not.
I am unsure if this was intentional on Luloff's part or if she forgot to count to fourteen.

Other than the time/place issue the stories are interesting and invoke much emotion. I am glad that I had the chance to read this book and others should, too. ( )

This was both a mesmerizing, somewhat disturbing read. The stories stand independently but are also interlinked. The stories were both well written and well told, but they left me feeling rather empty in the long run.

The stories involve people living in Sri Lanka during the civil war, and the effect the war had on their lives. Oddly the actual events of the war are mentioned only in passing. Clearly the reader should know what war does to the human psyche and yet the lack of direct linkage between the war and the characters left me with an odd kind of emptiness. In particular the 4 stories just seemed to come out of nowhere. How did things change so much? It was all too amorphous.

My husband, a combat vet and psychiatric nurse, tells me that sometimes Post Traumatic Shock is amorphous and unsettling. So perhaps that's the point. Still I wish I knew more. ( )

Many reviewers have written here, so I'll keep this short & try to avoid repeating their points. This set of linked stories offers a multi-faceted view, not only of Sri Lanka, but of the characters themselves. The protagonist in many a story shows up as a character in another, offering the reader a new view of who the person is. I liked this as well as the sense of atmosphere. There were times I felt the heat as I read. Luloff kept me immersed

And yet, each time I put the book down I felt a strange lack, a feeling of incompleteness. The stories are good, the characters interesting, the writing clear. But for me the stories never felt important, the characters never compelling, and the writing was flat. There was no transcendance here of the sort that distinguishes art from journalism.

In the end, I'm glad I read this book. I feel like I learned some things. But this isn't a keeper. ( )

In a series of somewhat connected stories, the author weaves together a look at life in Sri Lanka during a period of Civil War. Many of the stories focus on volunteers who were in Sri Lanka to give humanitarian aid. Others focus on the natives themselves. The writing, although fairly simple, does a good job of painting descriptions and is beautiful because of its simplicity. I enjoyed some of the stories more than others, but none were "duds." I enjoyed the talk of some of the foods in the latter chapters, but I would have enjoyed the passages more if they had been more descriptive. The book did provide some insight into a country and culture about which I knew little. It is probably not a book that will be right for everyone, but those who are interested in other cultures and who enjoy short stories which are interconnected will enjoy it. This book was provided through LibraryThing's Early Reviewer program with the expectation that a review would be written. ( )

this book gives an excellent look at the ongoing fighting in sri lanka and and the blood history behind it. all of these short stories are interconnected within a culture that still has ancient properties to it.
i enjoyed reading this book and learning some of the current issues that sri lanka has to face.

Yet another good Early Reviewers read for me.

I find it interesting how the author manages to link one story to another while setting each of them around a similar event (in this case, the start of a civil war that eventually plauged Sri Lanka for nearly four decades). One case in particular mentions a secondary character who becomes a central character in later stories (i.e. the last six stories involving Nilanthi, who was mentioned as a background in the beginning two stories of the book as a student of one of the American Peace Corps workers, Sam).

On the other hand, there are background characters that appear in one story that, to me, seem a little bit out of place in another. The other American Peace Corps worker, Lena, and Lucy, the teacher, come into mind (more the former than the latter).

Nevertheless, this was a good book for me. ( )

I was facinated by this book when I saw it because I wanted to read about something that was new to me (I am a history buff and I had never heard of the Sri Lankian Civil War) but I was dissapointed in this book I found myself bored with it and not connecting with it.
I would not recommend it. ( )

I was excited to read a book about Sri Lanka because 7 years ago I was able to have a very short visit there and next week my husband will be there for work. Whenever he (or we) travel, I like to read something to learn more about the country, culture, and people.

At first I was very disappointed with this book because the first chapters focused on Peace Corps and other ex-pat workers in Sri Lanka and not the nation itself. But I was intrigued by the writing style. Just as I would get interested in the life of one person the chapter would end and I was introduced to another seemingly unrelated character. But as the chapter would go on, I would see the connection to the previous personage. As the book went on, the focus was more on Sri Lankan nationals and I was glad to know more about the people of this land and what they went through during their long civil war. (Although, the author had at least one cultural mistake as Sri Lankan women do not wear wedding rings on their fingers.)

But then the author employed a technique to express the mental as well as physical anguish the people went through during the civil war. I have to admit that I have no idea what it would be like to go through the experiences and fears they had to go through, but I didn't feel that her technique worked. She skipped ahead too far too quickly, as though she tired of writing, and rather than have her characters deal with what life had handed them, she gave them the coping mechanism of hallucinations. I am sure that some people experienced that and that life in Sri Lanka during the civil war was horrible beyond imagining, but I finished the book feeling let down. But perhaps that was the author's intent. ( )

Joanna Luloff,s novel "The Beach at Galle Road" is a story of place. Set in Sri Lanka, the book is a series of stories told from the perspective of various characters. The characters live's intersect in many interesting ways but the beauty of this book, is the abililty of Ms Luloff to create "place" . Sri Lanka's civil war , the resulting affects on it's population and those people who are in country to provide aid are drawn with an artists pen throughout these short stories. This is not to say that the characters are secondary, Joanna Luloff, does a wonderful job in defining each of her characters in this format. When I started reading this novel my first thought was "So this is Sri Lanka". After a few short chapters this thought was followed by another "So these are the people who live in Sri Lanka" Those who are born to the country and those who visit......this book follows the lives of both.
Joanna Luloff was herself a volunteer for the Peace Corps in Sri Lanka...she was there for two years. Like most gifted story tellers, her powers of observation are keen and she translates this beautifully to the written word. Her portayal of a country during a civil and culteral war is both sensitive and intuitive, which gives the reader the feeling of understanding what it means to be in a country during a time of stress and change.
I would not hesitate to recommend this book. It is not a big book but it certainly tells a big tale. Another book group pick for me. So much to think about, so much to discuss. We are fortunate for the talents of story tellers such as Ms Luloff, whose experiences she shares with those of us who then are able to absorb some of them second hand. This is a beautiful book. ( )

I have not read anything set in Sri Lanka before, nor knew anything about the Civil War that raged in their country from 1983 to 2009. This novel does a wonderful job of highlighting the effects of this war, and on all different people: from Peace Corp workers, to volunteers who teach, families in the South who are away from the main action and the people in the North who are directly impacted. These linking stories are narrated each in a different voice and a different viewpoint, but always carrying over a character from the previous story. A mother who is afraid her son will be taken to join the military, a wife who cannot find her missing husband and many others. There are no graphic scenes of violence, just quiet contemplations of war, relationships and family. Reading this novel is like reading about real people, people one would know, in real situations, highlighting the stamina of individuals regardless of the situations in which they find themselves. I believe this is another first time novelist nbt one cannot tell that this is so from reading this novel. Very well done. ( )

Such excitement to sit and enjoy traveling to a far away land. To meet people very much my own, from a culture unbeknownst to me. As I turn the pages I shall hold by breath in anticipation of where we shall go together.
Silly me; I'm shell shocked, exhausted, and exhilarated from my travels. I've walked barefoot through places, wandered in the woods and meditated extensively. I've breathed in scents of home and stench of loss. I've loved and lost and found again. ( )