Long Shadows

“Written in long, slow discursions, A Passage North presents the conflict as a dismembering of the collective self of the nation, aside from the more obvious brutalities. It centres on Krishan, a young man working for an NGO in present-day Colombo, who decides on impulse to make a journey to the far north of Sri Lanka to attend the cremation of his grandmother’s former caretaker, Rani. Through the course of the novel’s three sections — ‘Message’, ‘Journey’ and ‘Burning’ — this deceptively simple story is told via Krishan’s memories and philosophical musings.”