The Story of a Brief Marriage

"My friend walked into the coffee shop where I was reading and saw the stricken look on my face. He asked what the book was. I read the first sentence to him: Most children have two whole legs and two whole arms but this little six-year-old that Dinesh was carrying had already lost one leg, the right one from the lower thigh down, and was now about to lose his right arm. The novel is set in the Sri Lankan civil war, but it could just as easily be Syria, Somalia or Yemen. I have never seen such horror rendered with such poetry. This may be the shortest book I read all year but it lodged in my brain more than almost any other."

"He inhabits the writing so deeply on a sensory level, taking his time, bringing us right there into tremendous pain and yearning for connection, and I think ultimately captures something profound about trauma."