A Passage North

by Anuk Arudpragasam (Hogarth, $27)

In Anuk Arudpragasam’s world, “to listen and to notice are moral acts,” said Tara Menon in The New York Times. The author’s second novel follows a two-day journey through Sri Lanka by an educated young man who feels obligated to attend the funeral pyre of a woman whose two sons died in the country’s long civil war. As the somber tale unfolds, the author of The Story of a Brief Marriage “observes even the most mundane of actions with an attention so absolute it feels devotional.”