Written with precision and grace, Anuk Arudpragasam's masterful new novel is an attempt to come to terms with life in the wake of devastation, and a poignant memorial for those lost and those still alive. 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. At once a powerful meditation on absence and longing, as well as an unsparing account of the legacy of Sri Lanka's thirty-year civil war, this procession to a pyre 'at the end of the earth' lays bare the imprints of an island's past, the unattainable distances between who we are and what we seek.

The protagonist Krishan, a Tamil man hailing from Colombo, takes a long train journey to a village in Northern Sri Lanka to attend the funeral of his grandmother's caretaker, Rani. His 2016 debut novel, The Story of a Brief Marriage, was a devastating and poignant portrait of a day in the civil war. The news arrives on the heels of an email from Anjum, an impassioned yet aloof activist Krishnan fell in love with years before while living in Delhi, stirring old memories and desires from a world he left behind.Īs Krishan makes the long journey by train from Colombo into the war-torn Northern Province for Rani's funeral, so begins an astonishing passage into the innermost reaches of a country. Anuk Arudpragasam's A Passage North is exceptional both in the style of writing and in its topic. Set in the decade following the end of military conflict in Sri Lanka and moving in the space between memory and daydream, the novel follows its protagonist as he travels north from Colombo to the devastated former warzone for the funeral of a woman he suspects has committed suicide. Longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize, A Passage North is Anuk Arudpragasam’s second book.

A young man journeys into Sri Lanka's war-torn north in this searing novel of longing, loss, and the legacy of war from the award-winning author of The Story of a Brief Marriage.Ī Passage North begins with a message from out of the blue: a telephone call informing Krishan that his grandmother's caretaker, Rani, has died under unexpected circumstances-found at the bottom of a well in her village in the north, her neck broken by the fall.

A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam