A young man receives a marriage proposal while digging a mass grave. In another story, in another place and time, either part of this situation would be cause for high emotion, but in Anuk Arudpragasam's debut novel, set in an evacuee camp during the final months of the Sri Lankan Civil War, Dinesh is impassive. He has no time to think on these things, "for the pit he was digging needed to be finished as quickly as possible, in order to free up space in the clinic for the new arrivals from the morning's shelling." In this landscape of bare life, Dinesh feels both wonder at, and detachment from, his body's continued existence (witness the scene of great tenderness concerning what he imagines to be his final shit). With his spontaneous marriage to Ganga, however, Dinesh is reborn to feeling, to memory, to possibility, which makes him vulnerable. Told over the course of a single day, this one has the feeling of a new classic.