Ayesha Inoon
The Sisters of Serendib
“Beautifully written and quietly devastating, The Sisters of Serendib traces the long shadow of separation and the stubborn pull of family. Each sister’s life feels intimate and real, shaped by loss yet reaching towards one another. A moving story about finding your way back across years, across silence and towards healing.”
HarperCollins, 2026
Three sisters are separated as children. Decades later, with so much lost and changed, can they find their way back to each other?
In 1990, a boat of asylum seekers leaves war-torn Sri Lanka, bound for Australia. When a mother dies on the journey, her three young daughters are separated and scattered across the country.
Years later, the eldest, Janu, still remembers the home she left and the sisters she's lost. Having freed herself from the grip of a painful childhood, she builds a life for herself in a coastal town, running a small shop called Serendib, where the air hums with memory and people come to find what they didn't know they were searching for.
In Melbourne, Samar, the middle sister, dances to speak the words she cannot say, pouring her longing and restlessness into movement, while in Sydney, Maryam, the youngest, finds magic in language, always searching for a place to belong.
As Janu discovers clues to her sisters' identities and begins the quest to bring them together, they all face the question: can something broken for so long ever be made whole again?
Beautiful and heartbreaking, this is the story of women who rise from loss to reclaim their stories, rebuild their lives, and step into the fierce beauty of their own becoming. A powerful new novel from the award-winning author of Untethered.
Untethered
HarperCollins, 2023
A finely observed debut novel of a young Muslim woman's experience of immigration to Australia from Sri Lankan-Australian writer Ayesha Inoon.
Zia secretly longs to go to university but as a young woman in a traditional Muslim family, she does what is expected of her and agrees to an arranged marriage to Rashid, a man she barely knows. Cocooned by the wealth and customs of her family, Rashid's dark moods create only the smallest of ripples in their early life together.
When growing political unrest spurs them to leave Sri Lanka and immigrate to Australia, Zia is torn between fear of leaving her beloved family and the possibility of new freedoms. While on paper their new country welcomes them with open arms, their visas come with many restrictions and for the first time Zia faces isolation, poverty and an increasingly unstable marriage that forms a cage stronger than any she's known before.
Determined to carve a place for herself in this new country, Zia sets out on uncertain terrain and discovers friendship, devastating loss and hope for a different future. One that asks her to consider not just who she is, but who she might become.
Winner of the 2022 ASA/HQ Fiction Prize.
“A nuanced and moving exploration of what it means to leave the only home you’ve ever known for the promise of a better life, Ayesha Inoon’s Untethered examines the crushing disappointments that can await immigrants and the ever-present question of whether they did the right thing.”
About the Author
Ayesha Inoon is a Sri Lankan-Australian writer whose work is shaped by her rich cultural heritage and lived experience. Born in Colombo, she travelled widely and worked as a journalist in Sri Lanka before migrating to Australia in 2013. Her writing explores themes of identity, belonging, and the resilience of women across cultures.
Her debut novel, Untethered - winner of the 2022 ASA/HQ Commercial Fiction Prize and Highly Commended in both the 2024 ACT Book of the Year and the ACT Literary Awards for Fiction - draws partly from her own journey as an immigrant Muslim woman. The novel was also supported by the inaugural Penguin Random House Write It Fellowship in 2019.
She lives in Canberra, on Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country with her two children and shares writing updates on Instagram at @ayeshainoon.
