A Passage North is the beautifully written second novel by Anuk Arudpragasam (The Story of a Brief Marriage). It uses protagonist Krishan's trip to northern Sri Lanka as a springboard for searching meditations on love, belonging and the aftermath of the island's brutal 30-year civil war.
When Krishan is informed of the death of his grandmother's caretaker, Rani, in a freak accident, Krishan suspects it was actually suicide. He decides to travel to the northeast to attend her funeral, and in so doing stirs up conflicting emotions about his Tamil heritage and the immense suffering brought about by the war that he sees himself as largely having escaped.
Much of A Passage North is about what it means to experience trauma secondhand: in documentaries about war crimes in the north that Krishan watches obsessively while living in India, in the hours spent "going page by page through blogs, forums, and news sites that shared images and videos taken during the last months of fighting," and in his relationship to people like Rani, who lost both her sons to the war. Krishan attempts to make sense of that enormous loss in the context of his own life, one spent searching for purpose and meaning.
Arudpragasam ties the novel together with ambitious prose, which makes even unlikely tangents feel incorporated into a cohesive whole, a part of Krishan's attempt to organize his knowledge and experiences into something meaningful. A Passage North succeeds remarkably at capturing the turmoil of a young man looking for a way forward amid the ghosts of the past. --Hank Stephenson, manuscript reader, the Sun magazine