The Lizard Cage by Karen Connelly
Beautifully written and taking us into an exotic land, Karen Connelly's debut novel The Lizard Cage is a celebration of the resilience of the human spirit.Teza once electrified the people of Burma with his protest songs against the dictatorship. Arrested by the Burmese secret police in the days of mass protest, he is seven years into a twenty-year sentence in solitary confinement. Cut off from his family and contact with other prisoners, he applies his acute intelligence, Buddhist patience, and humor to find meaning in the interminable days, and searches for news in every being and object that is grudgingly allowed into his cell. Despite his isolation, Teza has a profound influence on the people around him. His very existence challenges the brutal authority of the jailers, and his steadfast spirit inspires radical change. Even when Teza's criminal server tries to compromise the singer for his own gain, Teza befriends him and risks falling into the trap of forbidden conversation, food, and the most dangerous contraband of all: paper and pen. Yet, it is through Teza's relationship with Little Brother, a twelve-year-old orphan who's grown up inside the walls, that we ultimately come to understand the importance of hope and human connection in the midst of injustice and violence. Teza and the boy are prisoners of different orders: only one of them dreams of escape and only one of them will achieve it--their extraordinary friendship frees both of them in utterly surprising ways.
Karen Connelly's first book of poetry, The Small Words in My Body, won the Pat Lowther Award. Her first book of prose, Touch the Dragon: A Thai Journal - an account of the year she spent in Thailand at seventeen - won the Governor General's Literary Award for Nonfiction in 1993; at twenty-four, she was the youngest writer ever to win that prize. The Lizard Cage, Connelly's first novel, was shortlisted for both the Kiriyama Prize for Fiction and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. To write it, she found she had to lock herself in the cage along with the main character. For nine long years she imagined she was trapped in a windowless, 8 x 10 jail cell. I cried every day for the first four years that I worked on that book, Connelly said in an interview with Reader's Digest. There were times when I thought I would never be free of it. She went on to explain what helped to urge her forward, I came to realize that I was making my contribution to the largely unwritten history of kindness. At least that's one of my motives-to contribute to the literature of how people retain and nurture their humanity, particularly in difficult situations. Karen Connelly is currently working on a book of essays set in the refugee camps and among the rebel armies along the Burmese-Thai border. She makes her home in Toronto.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780679310228 |
| ISBN 10 | 0679310223 |
| Title | The Lizard Cage |
| Author | Karen Connelly |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Random House Of Canada, Limited |
| Year published | 2005-09-27 |
| Number of pages | 528 |
| Prizes | Kiriyama Prize |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |