- Published: 15/07/2021
- ISBN: 9781783786954
- Granta Books
- 304 pages
A Passage North
Anuk Arudpragasam
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2021
It begins with a message: a telephone call informing Krishan that his grandmother”s former care-giver, Rani, has died in unexpected circumstances, at the bottom of a well in her village in the north, her neck broken by the fall. The news arrives on the heels of an email from Anjum, an activist he fell in love with four years earlier while living in Delhi, bringing with it the stirring of distant memories and desires.
As Krishan makes the long journey by train from Colombo into the war-torn Northern Province for the funeral, so begins a passage into the soul of an island devastated by violence. Written with precision and grace, A Passage North is a poignant memorial for the missing and the dead, and a luminous meditation on time, consciousness, and the lasting imprint of the connections we make with others.
£8.99
A Passage North is written with scrupulous attention to nuance and detail... at its center is an exquisite form of noticing, a way of rendering consciousness and handling time that connects Arudpragasam to the great novelists of the past
Colm Toíbín
Mesmerizing, political, intimate, unafraid - this is a superb novel, a novel that pays such close, intelligent attention to the world we all live in
Sunjeev Sahota
A Passage North is a novel of consciousness alert to the turning of history and the micronavigations of bodies in a room. I''ve rarely read something so exquisitely alive
Naoise Dolan
From the Same Author
The Story of a Brief Marriage
Anuk Arudpragasam
Dinesh is a young man trapped on the frontlines between the Sri Lankan army and the Tamil Tigers. Desensitized to the horror all around him, life has been pared back to the essentials: eat, sleep, survive. All this changes when he is approached one morning by an older man who asks him to marry his daughter Ganga, hoping that victorious soldiers will be less likely to harm a married woman. For a few brief hours, Dinesh and Ganga tentatively explore their new and unexpected connection, trying to understand themselves and each other, until the war once more closes over them.
Told in meditative, nuanced and powerful prose, this shattering novel marks the arrival of an extraordinary new literary voice.
£8.99
Anuk Arudpragasam on Granta.com
Granta Books Writing | The Online Edition
Appamma in London
Anuk Arudpragasam
An excerpt from A Passage North, longlisted for the Booker Prize.
