A devastating, controlled first novel set over the course of a single day in a civilian camp during the final stages of the Sri Lankan civil war.

Dinesh, young, exhausted, and half-detached from himself by trauma, is approached by an older man with a proposal. He is to marry his daughter, Ganga, in the hope that some formal relation might offer her a little protection. From this almost impossible premise, Arudpragasam builds a novel of extraordinary stillness.

The title is very exact: this is a marriage, but also barely one; a story, but one that keeps refusing the false comfort of narrative shape. Arudpragasam’s prose is patient, lucid, bodily, philosophical — interested in what it means to remain alive when history has reduced life to its smallest actions. For readers of Michael Ondaatje, Jenny Erpenbeck, W. G. Sebald’s moral attention, or novels that treat political violence without turning it into either melodrama or abstraction.

First UK edition hardback, published by Granta Books in 2016. First printing. Signed/inscribed by the author on title page. Dust jacket present. Good second-hand condition.