At once subtle and shocking, powerful and probing, Minoli Salgado’s beautifully-written account of an island-wide journey through her ancestral home of Sri Lanka unearths concealed political violence through the stories of twelve victim survivors of the country’s twenty-six year civil war.

Written with deep insight and sensitivity, Twelve Cries from Home is an intimate, unsettling and daring work of witness that links speakers and listeners in ways that test and transgress the boundaries of place, time and genre. It offers fresh insights into the messy aftermath of war, exposing the tangle of relationships that connects victims and perpetrators and the different ways in which revenge is understood and reconciliation performed. It also offers a devastating critique of official denials and dismissals of torture, enforced disappearance and extrajudicial killings.

Reaching towards a future in which the voices of victims everywhere will be heard, each story in this remarkable work of travelling witness is chiselled into a “memory stone”, hurled in defiance against the silencing of historical truths.