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A Passage North

A Passage North

Author(s): Anuk Arudpragasam

Location(s): Sri Lanka

Genre(s): Fiction

Era(s): Contemporary

Location

Content

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.

A Passage North is written with scrupulous attention to nuance and detail. Its world is the deeply-layered, rich interior of its protagonist’s mind but also contemporary Sri Lanka itself, war-scarred, traumatized. 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’

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Book Reviews

Lead Review

Author: Tina Hartas

If an author sets a novel largely on a train, it becomes a vehicle in its own right for reflection and recollection. Thus it is that Krishan is travelling from Colombo in Sri Lanka,...

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