A Passage North

The closest we seem to get to the present are those brief moments we stop to consider the spaces our bodies are occupying, the warmth of the sheets in which we wake, the scratched surface of the window on a train taking us somewhere else...

A Passage North begins with a message out of the blue: a telephone call informing Krishan that his grandmother's caretaker, Rani, has died in unexpected circumstances--found 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 impassioned yet aloof activist he fell in love with four years before 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 Rani's funeral, so begins an astonishing passage into the heart of a country. At once a luminous meditation on connection and longing and a moving 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 and the distances we bridge in ourselves and those we love.

Written with precision and grace, Anuk Arudpragasam's masterful new novel is a poignant memorial for the lost and the living, an unsparing search for meaning amid tragedy.