Paper Plane

A Haunting Debut by Nifraz Rifaz

- BY TINA EDWARD GUNAWARDHANA

Young author Nifraz Rifaz announced himself as a compelling new voice in contemporary Sri Lankan fiction with Paper Plane, a lyrical and deeply unsettling debut that examined identity, displacement, and the heavy cost of silence in a fractured society.

Drawing from lived experience, collective memory, and national trauma, Rifaz has written a novel that moves fluidly between Sri Lanka and London, following a protagonist shaped as much by expectation as by the unspoken weight of history.

At the centre of the novel is Zed, a frustrated, musical, and profoundly human character navigating the contradictions of modern life. In Zed’s world, home had once been neutral territory—a place of fragile peace, provided one kept quiet. His family's expectations for him were simple and nonnegotiable: build a respectable future in business, marry the girl chosen for him, and bury everything else. His doubts, his music, and the parts of himself that resisted conformity were meant to remain hidden, safely out of sight.