The Eighteen Masks

About this book

The mask carvers of the south coast are famous, and the Dias family among the most famous of them, and their set of eighteen, the complete cast of the traditional folk drama the family has performed for generations, is known to every collector and museum, admired as the finest surviving set of its kind. Nadeesha Dias grew up among the eighteen masks, learned to carve at her great uncle Bandula's side, and is now, at twenty six, the last of the family still practising the craft, keeping alive, almost alone, a tradition the world has moved past. She knows the eighteen masks as characters, the noble one and the fool and the old woman and the rest, the cast of a story performed a thousand times. She does not know, until the oldest mask cracks and she opens it to restore it, that they are something else entirely.