Named a Best Book of 2016 by NPR, The Boston Globe, BuzzFeed, The Financial Times, The Globe and Mail, and Entropy Magazine Named One of the Top 10 Novels of 2016 by The Wall Street Journal Winner of the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize 'synopsis' may belong to another edition of this title. Set over the course of a single day and night, this unflinching debut confronts marriage and war, life and death, bestowing on its subjects the highest dignity, however briefly.

Thrust into this situation of strange intimacy and dependence, Dinesh and Ganga try to come to terms with everything that has happened, hesitantly attempting to awaken to themselves and to one another before the war closes over them once more.Īnuk Arudpragasam’s The Story of a Brief Marriage is a feat of extraordinary sensitivity and imagination, a meditation on the fundamental elements of human existence―eating, sleeping, washing, touching, speaking―that give us direction and purpose, even as the world around us collapses. As a couple, they would be less likely to be conscripted to fight for the rebels, and less likely to be abused in the case of an army victory. Marriage, in this world, is an attempt at safety, like the beached fishing boat under which Dinesh huddles during the bombings. Alienated from family, home, language, and body, he exists in a state of mute acceptance, numb to the violence around him, till he is approached one morning by an old man who makes an unexpected proposal: that Dinesh marry his daughter, Ganga. Amongst the evacuees is Dinesh, whose world has contracted to a makeshift camp where time is measured by the shells that fall around him like clockwork. Two and a half decades into a devastating civil war, Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority is pushed inexorably towards the coast by the advancing army.

'One of the best books I have read in years.' ―Colm Toibin “ is a book that makes one kneel before the elegance of the human spirit and the yearning that is at the essence of every life.” ― The New York Times Book Review

The story of brief marriage