Story of a Brief Marriage

From the Booker Prize-shortlisted author of A Passage NorthShortlisted for the Dylan Thomas PrizeWinner of the DSC Prize for South Asian LiteratureDinesh and Ganga meet and marry in the final days of the Sri Lankan civil war. For months their lives have been pared back to the essentials: eat, sleep, survive. Now, as the army draws ever closer, they begin to explore their new and unexpected connection - a fragile light to keep the war at bay.

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, 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, A closely-focused hypnotic novel of serious intensity, An essential book, and not just because its setting and its subject matter are essential, but because it is so awake to - in fact haunted by -elements of experience that rarely make it onto the page. The Story of a Brief Marriage examines the violence and tenderness of human beings in a time of war, but one suspects that Anuk Arudpragasam could choose to write about anybody, in any circumstance, and through his pen one would feel the mysterious tug of time upon their senses and the nakedness of their minds before the world, This small story of a brief marriage sends out ripples far beyond its parameters: it bears witness to the lives and suffering of those thousands of men, women, and children who perished in the last days of Sri Lanka's civil war, whose numbers are still uncounted and who lie in unmarked graves. When future generations want to understand, in human terms, what happened, they will read this graceful masterpiece

ANUK ARUDPRAGASAM is from Colombo, Sri Lanka and is currently working towards a doctorate in philosophy at Columbia University. He writes in English and Tamil. This is his first novel.