THE STORY OF A BRIEF MARRIAGE

Anuk Arudpragasam

This novel is set two-and-a-half decades into Sri Lanka’s devastating civil war, when the country’s Tamil minority is being pushed towards the coast by the advancing army. One of the evacuees is Dinesh, whose world has contracted to a makeshift camp. 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. The marriage thrusts the couple into a situation of strange intimacy and dependence

HarperCollins India, 208 pages, Rs 499