No Country - Tapa dura

This beautifully-written, intelligent novel probes the nature of family, nation and home - of the loyalties and allegiances which comprise identity itself . the story spans many generations and three continents to weave a panoramic tapestry, the very fabric of how we are all connected. This is a moving and compelling tale

In November 1989, an Indian couple are discovered murdered in a small town in upstate New York. They lie together as though just disengaged from a long embrace. Yet their murder has been two centuries in the making.

County Sligo, Ireland, 1843. Seventeen-year-old Brendan McCarthaigh and his best friend Padraig have everything ahead of them. Quiet Brendan is in love with books and headstrong, spirited Padraig is madly in love with black-haired Brigid. But when the sanctimonious Father Conlon discovers Padraig and Brigid's clandestine affair, he sets in motion a chain of unforeseeable, irrevocable events that will propel one to North America and the other to Bengal.

Weaving together private histories and real events, and taking us on a journey across the globe - Kalyan Ray has crafted a sweeping, epic, multigenerational saga spanning two centuries. A rich, compelling tale of home and exile, identity and hybridity, it is also a story of oppression, friendship and compassion, and the few intimate degrees of separation that lie between love and murder.