Amanda Jayatissa

My Sweet Girl won the International Thriller Writers Best First Novel award in 2022, and its narrator is a puzzle rather than a guide: Paloma Evans, adopted out of a Sri Lankan orphanage into a wealthy American family, thirty years old in San Francisco, holding a secret that her lodger Arun works out before she can pay him to keep quiet. She finds him dead, and by the time the police arrive the body has gone. Running under the present-day chapters is Mohini, the white-clad figure of Sinhalese folklore, whom Amanda Jayatissa later took as her subject in Island Witch (Berkley, 2024), set in 19th-century Matara and narrated by the daughter of a village demon priest. Sinhala is her first language. Sri Lanka is where she grew up, and she works as a corporate trainer and runs a business alongside her writing, and has since moved to Portugal with her husband. You're Invited (2022) came between the two.