The Lizard Cage
by Karen Connelly

Random House of Canada
ISBN: 978-0-679-31022-8
(0-679-31022-3)
Forthcoming US edition to be published by Nan Telese/Doubleday

The much-anticipated debut novel from the remarkable Karen Connelly, award-winning poet and non-fiction writer, is a hymn to human resilience, love and humour — a potent act of empathy and witness.

Inside his solitary confinement cell, Teza, who once electrified the people of Burma with his protest songs against the dictatorship, now applies his acute intelligence and Buddhist patience to finding meaning in the interminable days. Arrested by the Burmese secret police, cut off from his family for the first seven years of a twenty-year sentence, Teza painstakingly unrolls the newspaper filters of his rationed cheroots to seek news of the outside world.

But even in isolation, he has a profound influence on the people around him. His integrity and humour inspire the conscience-ridden senior jailer to radical change. His very existence challenges the brutal authority of the junior jailer, perversely nicknamed Handsome. Teza’s most steady human contact, the common criminal Sein Yun, his food server, views him as his ticket out of jail, trying to entice Teza into Handsome’s web.

Lastly there’s Little Brother, an orphan who’s grown up inside the jail, imprisoned by his own deprivation. Teza and the boy are prisoners of different orders, but their extraordinary friendship frees both of them in utterly surprising ways. Overturning our expectations, Karen Connelly presents us with a world that celebrates human spirit, and spirit itself, in the midst of injustice and trauma.

Karen Connelly

Karen Connelly lived for many years in Burma and Thailand. She won the Canadian Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction for Touch the Dragon: A Thai Journal, published in the US under the title Dream of a Thousand Lives, a New York Times Notable Travel Book of the Year 2002 (Seal Press). The Lizard Cage is her first novel. She currently teaches creative writing in Toronto.  

Source: www.randomhouse.ca

Read a review of this book by Maxine Hong Kingston, one of the 2006 Kiriyama Prize judges for fiction, in Pacific Rim Voices' WaterBridge Review.