Amma by Saraid de Silva

Originally written for lesbrary.com

Some silences are so profound that they become part of the landscape, not just heard but inhabited. Amma knows that terrain—how silence gets passed down not just through forgetting but through a caring that has been cornered. In this debut novel from Saraid de Silva, the unspoken doesn’t just haunt the margins of the characters’ lives; it forms their foundation.

The narrative follows three women—Josephina, Sithara, and Annie—across time and place, not to establish clear boundaries between them, but to illustrate how lineage frequently repeats, refracts, and shifts form, but not weight. The structure of the book itself mirrors the nature of our memory, resisting chronology and instead moving in an unfixed, unsteady manner, full of involuntary returns. These women are connected not only by their blood, but also by the fragments of their lives that kept them afloat.

De Silva’s language is clean-edged and rhythmically deliberate, reflecting the novel’s themes by giving breath to the unsayable without trying to resolve it. Her prose never strains for beauty, which it achieves nonetheless; that makes its moments of lyricism land all the harder. The way she renders places isn’t decorative—it’s diagnostic. Invercargill “thinks it is a city” but feels more like a closed door. Hamilton carries “the air of a party that just finished,” with all the aftertaste and stale expectation. Dislocation doesn’t stand out in these places; rather, it gradually becomes ingrained.

Amma approaches trauma in a way that seems especially exact: not only what happened but also what came next. The process of forced forgetting and the ensuing silence evolved into a ritual. It reads, at times, like seeing an echo of something I know—not exactly, but close enough to leave a mark on me. It reminded me of the truth that certain stories can vanish from our lives without erasing them. In some families, silence can become an unspoken mother tongue.

Queerness quietly weaves itself into the story like a natural pattern in this work. The youngest, Annie, is queer in a way that seems well-known and lived in—not always by others, but by herself. Her sexuality is part of the air around her, in the texture of touch and the tone of apprehension. And yet, she is not alone in it. Queerness ripples backward through the generations—not named, not always kind, but undeniably present. You can perceive it in those who shy away from it and in those who make it unmentionable.

While some timeline shifts are abrupt and a few characters remain a little underdeveloped, the novel’s emotional architecture remains strong and cohesive. This book encourages the reader to recognise incomplete elements, such as gestures rather than explicit explanations and a sense of closeness that exists alongside erasure.

And the ending doesn’t merely resolve; it reverberates. It hovers on the boundary of language, not seeking comprehension, but seeking to be heard. Amma isn’t about reclaiming what was lost; it’s about recognising the space it left behind. The void that occasionally persists within us remains. It was the absence that taught us how to listen.