He has not slept for days, and he has not eaten. As the conflict draws in, the refugees are crushed towards the coast, and although Dinesh seems not much more than a boy, there is a constant risk that – if he isn’t killed by the shelling – as an able-bodied male he will be captured and enlisted to fight for the movement. The story begins in a refugee camp, one of many which has formed as the civilians try to flee being caught between government forces and what is always referred to as ‘the movement’, which I take to mean the Tamil Tigers. It tells the story of how Dinesh, over the course of a day and a night, moves from a state of numb acceptance of having lost everything, to a hesitant awakening. Shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and winner of the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, The Story of a Brief Marriage is Anuk Arudpragasam’s first novel. But it is so exquisitely crafted, and the character of Dinesh so powerfully wrought, that the reader comes to share his tentative hopes. I knew what was coming – it is called The Story of a Brief Marriage after all – and from the very first pages when Dinesh, a Sri Lankan evacuee during the Sri Lankan civil war, moves across a blasted landscape with a gravely injured child in his arms, I knew this story could not end well. It took a while for me to recover after coming to the devastating end of this extraordinary short novel.
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