Ruins is the impressive début novel of Rajith Savanadasa, born in Sri Lanka and now living in Melbourne. He is founder and primary contributor to Open City Stories, a website documenting the lives of a group of asylum seekers in Melbourne, lives that may have been in similar ruins to those described in the book.

Five voices tell the story set in the anxious period at the end of the twenty-six-year-long Sri Lankan Civil War. Since 1983 an intermittent insurgency against the government by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam had torn the country apart. The Tigers' dream of an independent Tamil state in Sri Lanka's north and east finally ended on 18 May 2009 when government troops defeated the remaining Tigers.