- Published: 06/10/2016
- ISBN: 9781783782390
- Granta Books
- 208 pages
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
Very seldom in a reading life does a novel alter your sense not only of literature but of the world. This extraordinary debut is of that class: a novel of consciousness unrelenting in its devotion to the imperiled body; an exquisite, unbearably moving work of art equally alive to brutality and tenderness. Anuk Arudpragasam has written a great book. I will never forget it
Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You
Anuk Arudpragasam's novel is a work of furious, hypnotic beauty -- honest and unsparing in its engagement with the consequences of war, and brilliantly tender and generous in its portrayal of love
Dinaw Mengestu, author, All Our Names
A closely-focused hypnotic novel of serious intensity
Romesh Gunesekera
From the Same Author
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.
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.
