In 2001, Fulbright scholar Adele Barker and her son Noah traveled from Tucson to the island of Sri Lanka to live for a year, where she would teach at a university and he would attend school. Her beautifully written book chronicles their time there with the vividness of a travelogue and the insight of a historian. Settling into the island’s verdant central highlands, they would spend the next year immersing themselves in the customs, cultures, and landscapes of Sri Lanka—its elephants, hot curries and the resonant evening chants from its temples. They would also encounter a world infused with many religious traditions and a troubled history of sectarian violence that has culminated in an ongoing twenty-five-year civil war.