THE NAME THEY GAVE ME: A Novel of Jaffna

She kept one page out of the record for twenty-two years. To be believed now, she has to hand it over.Melbourne, 2010. A United Nations panel is collecting evidence on Sri Lanka, and it is collecting for sixty days only. In a safe deposit box under a tram line, human rights lawyer Vaani Kandiah keeps four school exercise books filled with a dead girl's handwriting: the most complete first-person account of child recruitment by the Tamil Tigers that exists anywhere.She has given copies to researchers four times over sixteen years. Every copy is missing the same page.Jaffna, 1987. Nila Anthonipillai is thirteen when her father, the only physician on the peninsula, is taken at a checkpoint and returned four days later to die in his own ward. In April she rides eleven kilometres on a bicycle and gives her name to a man with a ledger, who writes down a year of birth that is not hers. She is given a new name. She is given a cyanide capsule on a cord, and it is the only warm thing she owns.She is dead within eight months. She writes down everything.What Vaani removed from that record is nine lines long, and it names her. Submitting it will expose a respected man now funding her own son's heritage trip, hand her enemies a weapon they have wanted for twenty years, and destroy the credibility of the only document that proves a fourteen-year-old was fourteen.THE NAME THEY GAVE ME is a novel about who is permitted to tell the story of a war, and what it costs the person left holding the evidence.For readers of The Nightingale, Beasts of No Nation, Girl at War and Island of a Thousand Mirrors.