Drawing on his Sri Lankan Tamil heritage, his family’s experiences of war and migration, and moments of joy and strife in Western Sydney, Gather Up Your World in One Long Breath maps memory as it appears to us fragmented, unreliable, non-linear.   

Shakthidharan invites us into the rooms of his family life: the house his ancestors rebuilt after fleeing civil war, the fault lines of parent–child relationships, the pain of estrangement and the work of forgiveness, and the everyday chaos of raising a family. The narrative moves between hard political history and tender domestic motion — from the Tamil civil war to washing dishes beside his mother — with honesty, empathy, and stylistic grace.

It’s a memoir that is simultaneously personal and expansive, confronting loss and love, grief and laughter, and the legacy that lives inside ordinary places and people.