Author(s): Anuk Arudpragasam

Novel | Asia | Read our reviews! | Sri Lanka

From a prize winning Sri Lankan author, a story of age and youth, loss and survival that builds into a magisterial reckoning with mortality.

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 revelatory exploration of the aftermath of war... (An) extraordinary and often illuminating novel' - Financial Times

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.

Reviews:

'Mesmerizing, political, intimate, unafraid - this is a superb novel, a novel that pays such close, intelligent attention to the world we all live in' - Sunjeev Sahota, author of the Booker shortlisted The Year of the Runaways

'A Passage North is written with scrupulous attention to nuance and detail...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' - Colm Toibin, New York Times bestselling author of Brooklyn and The Testament of Mary

'a revelatory exploration of the aftermath of war... (An) extraordinary and often illuminating novel' - Financial Times Review

I've rarely read something so exquisitely alive -- Naoise Dolan

It can take just two novels to establish a writer as one of the most individual minds of their generation... With his new novel, a revelatory exploration of the aftermath of war, Arudpragasam cements his reputation... [An] extraordinary and often illuminating novel * Financial Times *

Anuk Arudpragasam's A Passage North is a profound and disquieting account of the making of a self, of the pressures of history, desire, will, and chance that determine the shape of a life. It's difficult to think of comparisons for Arudpragasam's work among current English-language writers; one senses, reading his two extraordinary novels, a new mastery coming into being -- Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness and What Belongs to You Life is short but remembering is long.

In the aftermath of war, Anuk Arudpragasam's rich, rewarding sentences return the reader to all that is living -- Amitava Kumar Anuk

Arudpragasam is an artist of revelations. In A Passage North, he continues to map, with beauty, grace, and fire, the responsibilities we carry in a world that is forever on the brink. This is a novel as both an elegy and a love song, not only for a place, but for the souls, living and dead, who are bound to that place-what an unforgettable and perfect reading experience, and one that unearths truths, relentlessly, magically -- Paul Yoon

A beautiful, urgent novel of displacement, love and atrocity set on a single long journey. Arudpragasam has achieved something extraordinary here - a philosophical novel that draws you in through the sheer depth and elegance of its ideas and expression until you feel like you're stowing away in the protagonist's mind -- Luke Kennard

 * Profound... hypnotic... Arudpragasam explores the desire for independence that enflamed the decades-long civil war, the violence that ensued and the emotional scars that refuse to heal * Observer *

It is an incredibly introspective work. Through the particularities of Krishan's experience and inner life, Arudpragasam seamlessly unfurls ruminations on intimacy, trauma, and the passage of time * Paris Review *

Arudpragasam is a patient and meticulous observer. * Guardian

Author Biography: Anuk Arudpragasam was born in Colombo and currently lives between Sri Lanka and India. His debut novel, The Story of a Brief Marriage, won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, and was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize as well as the Internationaler Literaturpreis. He received a doctorate in philosophy from Columbia University in 2019.

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STELLA'S REVIEW: 
Anuk Arudpragasam’s second novel takes us back to the civil war in Sri Lanka. It is a reflective, philosophical view through the eyes of Krishan — a young Tamil man recently returned to Colombo and confronting his country’s violence, as well as contemplating his relationships with his family and the woman he thinks he still loves. On a long train trip to attend a funeral, he has time to think and Arudpragsam uses this tool of the journey to take us across the northern landscape scarred by war and destruction, as well as the internal landscape of Krishan’s thoughts: both lively memories and contemplative existentialism. Here, on the page, we travel between the present and the past, rich in descriptive language and cultural references. Away studying in India when the worst atrocities occurred in Sri Lanka, Krishan is riven with guilt and obsesses about certain activists, documentaries and news items, as well as others’ personal experiences. His guilt is also balanced by his interest in Tamil literature and cultural practices, making his response in the post-war years less stifling than it could have been. Arudpragasam, while never flinching from the devastation wrought, physically and mentally, by war, gives us room to breathe. It is quietly affecting rather than aggressive in its intent. Many of the scenes — and it does feel like a series of windows and doors opening into the different worlds of Krishan (the train heading north, his days with his lover Anjum, his relationship with his grandmother) — are domestic and relatable. Told gracefully, walking the streets in the early evening, remembering a confrontation on a train, lighting a cigarette, these observances are precise, detailed and nuanced, providing more than their supposed simplicity of action. The watchful eye of Krishan tells us much about the impact of a violent past and the ongoing endeavour to come to terms with the emotional chaos that rises from this past, from whichever place you stand. Either directly affected, as in the case of Rani (the woman who has recently died), tormented by the death of two sons and her own subsequent mental anguish, or indirectly, like Krishan, knowing and witnessing second-hand but unsure how to assimilate this history. It is also a novel about connections, and how human relationships change us, as well as challenge our preconceptions.  A Passage North, intelligent and meditative, is quietly confronting. 

A PASSAGE NORTH by Anuk Arudpragasam is a subtly written and thoughtful novel exploring the deep psychological and social impacts of the long civil war in Sri Lanka, and the struggle for agency for young people overwhelmed by societal trauma.