The Story of a Brief Marriage - Softcover

'Deeply engaging... The Story of a Brief Marriage is a strange, profound, mini-masterpiece of a novel. Arudpragasam writes with control, clarity and a terrible beauty that acknowledges the world's grandeur in the midst of darkness' -- Financial Times

'An extraordinary debut... a hypnotic, harrowing book' -- Mail on Sunday

'Us[ing] placid, even poetic prose [...] The Story of a Brief Marriage takes a fraught political-historical moments and creates out of it a fable-like novel... [with] restraint and poise... [An] often formidable novel' -- Guardian

'Highly impressive... This is a breathtakingly intimate novel... Arudpragasam is aware above all of what fragile creatures we are, and writes of horrors with great compassion and delicacy' -- Daily Mail

'The Story of a Brief Marriage [offers] a glimpse into a fledgling relationship formed under extreme circumstances. A pensive and tender portrait of how human beings reach for each other in times of need, the novel explores what it means to be alive when dignity has been stripped away. Arudpragasam's unadorned and measured prose [...] recalls Primo Levi's If This Is a Man' -- Irish Times

'A novel of hymn-like grace' -- Wall Street Journal

'[An] astonishing novel, written in intense and rhythmnical prose, shocking and numbing in turn' -- Lisa McInerney, Irish Independent

'The author spares the reader nothing of the visceral, graphic violence inflicted on his characters... The arbitrary, casual nature of death is a constant presence in the book. However, Arudpragasam writes with a delicacy and precision that cuts against the horror of his subject matter and underscores the basic humanity of his doomed protagonists... A striking debut' -- New Internationalist

'A tale with the emotional power of a Greek tragedy... an unsentimental depiction of human beings that is also a heartbreaking love story' -- Press Association
'Poignant, painful and completely beautiful, you'll hold your breath for the one sitting it will take you to read this debut novel set in a refugee camp in Sri Lanka during the civil war... Haunting and mesmerising, this feels less a novel than a philosophy on how to live when the world is against you' -- Pool

'Very seldom in a reading life does a novel alter your sense not only of literature but of the world. This extraordinary debut is of that class: a novel of consciousness unrelenting in its devotion to the imperiled body; an exquisite, unbearably moving work of art equally alive to brutality and tenderness. Anuk Arudpragasam has written a great book. I will never forget it' -- Garth Greenwell

'This small story of a brief marriage sends out ripples far beyond its parameters: it bears witness to the lives and suffering of those thousands of men, women, and children who perished in the last days of Sri Lanka's civil war, whose numbers are still uncounted and who lie in unmarked graves. When future generations want to understand, in human terms, what happened, they will read this graceful masterpiece' -- Shyam Selvadurai

'A delicate, detailed examination of the old boy-meets-girl story, told in the context of a refugee camp in the midst of a civil war... Reading this book is an act of witness so intimate... it changed me' -- Rumpus

'Beautifully descriptive... Haunting... This gorgeously written novel is similar to Vaddey Ratner's In the Shadow of the Banyon in the way it captures intimate human experiences in the face of war' --Booklist

'Anuk Arudpragasam's novel is a work of furious, hypnotic beauty - honest and unsparing in its engagement with the consequences of war, and brilliantly tender and generous in its portrayal of love' -- Dinaw Mengestu

'An essential book, and not just because its setting and its subject matter are essential, but because it is so awake to - in fact haunted by - elements of experience that rarely make it onto the page. The Story of a Brief Marriage examines the violence and tenderness of human beings in a time of war, but one suspects that Anuk Arudpragasam could choose to write about anybody, in any circumstance, and through his pen one would feel the mysterious tug of time upon their senses and the nakedness of their minds before the world' -- Kevin Brockmeier

'Anuk Arudpragasam's The Story of a Brief Marriage opens with some of the most extraordinary pages I have come across in recent years and then continues to amaze. Unafraid to look its huge subjects - death, war, life, love - straight in the eye, it nonetheless remains marvelously, miraculously light on its feet. Arudpragasam writes with courage, precision and tenderness. You feel it in every sentence. Read this novel. See what he has done' -- Laird Hunt

'I loved The Story of a Brief Marriage. I loved the delicacy in the language, which seemed to me to have the quality of thought unfolding. This is a novel written with such care, such devoted noticing: it's a special writer whose mind alights on the way a thumb was 'still hurting from holding the scissors', or how climbing a ladder you sometimes feel 'nothing but the rung around which your toes are curled' -- Sunjeev Sahota

'A closely-focused hypnotic novel of serious intensity' -- Romesh Gunesekera

'Anuk Arudpragasam's extraordinary debut shies away from nothing in its unassuming approach and narrative - wishes and hopes for life, love, a safe place called home. Cast against the upheaval wrought by a particular conflict in a very particular (a single day's) time, this story is one with resonance for so many other conflicts that our world presently knows and suffers. This book is beautiful, brave, quietly profound' -- Elliott Bay Book Company

'The horrors of the world's constant wars have been well chronicled in many recent novels and The Story of a Brief Marriage takes its rightful place among them as one of the best. This spare work conveys not only the indiscriminate loss of life but also the abandonment of all hope and feeling. As young Dinesh and Ganga struggle to maintain their humanity in the face of circumstances they cannot control, it makes the inevitable ending that much more poignant and heart rending' -- Square Books

'The Story of a Brief Marriage is astounding. Anuk Arudpragasam has done something so brilliant and so simple I'm still reeling. He's written a book about the great subjects, love, war, life, and death. But he's done it through the lens of the body. I think I started writing because I wanted to read this book' --
Nayomi Munaweera

'In Dinesh, Arudpragasam creates a wholly empathetic and doting character... The author crafts flowing, beautiful sentences that put readers in the middle of the camp with Dinesh and Ganga. Dinesh finds beauty in the worst of situations, which contributes to making this debut moving and hopeful' -- Publishers Weekly

'A small miracle of a debut... Brief but shattering, this poetic, philosophical, transporting work confronts the reader with the texture of life endured behind numbing, daily news headlines. What does it mean to be human when living under a rain of death? This most humane of novels offers an attempt at an answer' --Book Oxygen

'[Arudpragasam] writes with a composure and confidence of a veteran, whose sentences shed the skin of what has unfurled previously, as a new stream replenishing itself across an otherwise barren plateau... The prose which blossoms from this dungheap of catastrophe [is] remarkable, for each sentence snares our imagination and we cannot escape... The tenderness which Arudpragasam unearths in the most trying of circumstances is not spoiled by a cloying indulgence, he captures beautifully the amorphous lightness of Dinesh's uncertain and awkward effort to become a husband' -- Echo

'The Story of a Brief Marriage is a devastating account of political violence that refuses the grand abstractions of political discourse and dwells instead in complicated moments of intimacy -- and in the ragged, luminous particulars of physical experience. It brings Ezra Pound's notion of periplum -- the shoreline as seen by the sailor, not as it appears on the map -- to the terrain of war. It's the merciless, unsurrendered song of what it means to live in the midst of death. This novel changed my sense of how a novel can draw its own borders, and what it can do inside them' -- Leslie Jamison

'With care and precision, Arudpragasam delivers a deeply contemplative, psychological portrait of war and how quickly language and memory fall away in the face of constant terror. Arudpragasam writes in long, breathless passages, following the trail of Dinesh's apprehensions about sex, survival, and intimacy. For all the bombs that devastate Dinesh's country, this novel offers instead the 'strange, weightless stillness' of trauma's emotional aftermath. An incisive glimpse into the brutality of war and the tender, human urge to connect in the face of death and destruction' -- Kirkus

'The Story of a Brief Marriage contains a series of mesmerizingly visceral scenes, It's short and riveting, but I had to read it slowly to give its deep power time to unfold, the sublime beauty of love and the stark cruelty of war evoked through the truths of the body. It's an amazing novel. I can't forget it' --Kate Christensen

Dinesh is a young man trapped on the frontlines between the Sri Lankan army and the Tamil Tigers. Desensitized to the horror all around him, life has been pared back to the essentials: eat, sleep, survive. All this changes when he is approached one morning by an older man who asks him to marry his daughter Ganga, hoping that victorious soldiers will be less likely to harm a married woman. For a few brief hours, Dinesh and Ganga tentatively explore their new and unexpected connection, trying to understand themselves and each other, until the war once more closes over them. Told in meditative, nuanced and powerful prose, this shattering novel marks the arrival of an extraordinary new literary voice.