A Passage North

‘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

‘one senses, reading his two extraordinary novels, a new mastery coming into being’ – Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs To You and Cleanness

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…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

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.