Having been on holiday to Sri Lanka this summer and keen to read more about the civil war, I read A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam a few weeks after my return in September. It’s a beautiful, slow, meditative book that I was fully committed to from the first chapter.

Krishan, the protagonist, is in Colombo when he receives both a message that his grandmother’s former carer Rani has just died, and an email from a former lover, Anjum. Having been the one to introduce his beloved grandmother to her carer, he decides he should be at her funeral to represent the family, and sets off on an early train from Colombo to the north of the island, where the civil war took its heaviest toll.

As long train journeys can do, he is soon immersed in memories. First there is how he met Rani, when she was receiving mental health treatment in a hospital, both her sons having been killed in the war, leaving her desolate and locked forever in trauma and grief. Then there is his aging grandmother, whose faculties faded and took a sudden turn for the worse after a misguided trip to England. Finally, is Anjum, with whom he had a passionate affair when living in India, before he decided to dedicate his life to helping Sri Lanka heal in the aftermath of war.

The slow pace and long, lyrical, poetic sentences means you can almost hear the wheels turning on the train track as the language unfolds, in a way that is surprisingly light despite the heavy subject matter. This is quite simply a beautiful book and immediately made me want to return to Sri Lanka to visit the north.