The Story of a Brief Marriage is a feat of extraordinary sensitivity and imagination, a meditation on the fundamental elements of human existence - eating, sleeping, washing, touching, speaking - that give us direction and purpose, even as the world around us collapses. Set over the course of a single day and night, this unflinching debut confronts marriage and war, life and death, bestowing on its subjects the highest dignity, however briefly.

Anuk Arudpragasam is from Colombo, Sri Lanka, and for the time being lives between Colombo and New York, where he is completing a dissertation in philosophy at Columbia University. The Story of a Brief Marriage is his first novel, and it will be translated into French, German, Dutch and Italian. He writes in English and Tamil