TILL NEW TIMES COME

The novel opens on the morning of 25 September 1959, with Bandaranaike immersed in the routines of statecraft—receiving petitioners, meeting the American ambassador, preparing for a diplomatic journey abroad—moments before an assassin in the robes of a Buddhist monk steps onto the veranda. The attack shatters not only the quiet of his home but the fragile political balances of a newly independent nation. As he is rushed to Colombo General Hospital, bleeding and disoriented, the story follows him into surgery and into the fractured, shifting terrain of a mind struggling to remain awake and responsible in the face of catastrophe.

Through lucid moments, drifting memories, and hallucinatory visions, the narrative travels through the defining periods of his life: his childhood at Horagolla under the shadow of a proud and distant father; his formative years at St. Thomas’ College under the principled Warden Stone; his time at Oxford, where he grappled with identity, self-belief, and the early promise of leadership; and his turbulent political rise in Ceylon, shaped by the hopes and grievances of a country emerging from colonial rule. These recollections illuminate the tensions surrounding language, nationhood, caste, class, and belonging—issues that continue to animate South Asian political history and remain central to postcolonial Sri Lankan literature.

The novel does not seek to settle the long-standing debates surrounding Bandaranaike’s legacy. Instead, it invites readers into a more intimate inquiry: What does a leader see when he looks back from the threshold of death? What doubts, regrets, or flashes of clarity rise to the surface when public power falls away and only private conscience remains? As the hours pass, the boundaries of time and place blur. Figures from his past appear beside his hospital bed—teachers, rivals, allies, and imagined visitors from a future he will never witness. In these visions he encounters not prophecy, but the unfolding consequences of choices made during his brief but transformative tenure, including the cultural and political shifts that would shape Sri Lanka long after 1959.

Anchored in meticulous historical detail yet written with the lyricism of interior monologue, Till New Times Come blends the factual and the imagined to illuminate the inner life of one of Sri Lanka’s most consequential and contested leaders. More than a historical novel about Sri Lanka, it is a story about power and vulnerability, ambition and responsibility, and the fragile line between public decisions and private reckoning. Ultimately, the novel portrays a man striving, in his final hours, to understand the nation he helped remake—and the one he must now leave behind. In doing so, it offers a deeply human portrait for readers drawn to historical fiction about Sri Lankan politics, the complexities of leadership, and the enduring legacy of the Bandaranaike assassination.