The Lizard Cage
Set during Burma's military dictatorship of the mid—1990s, Karen Connelly’s exquisitely written and harshly realistic debut novel is a hymn to human resilience and love.
In the sealed-off world of a vast Burmese prison known as the cage, Teza languishes in solitary confinement seven years into a twenty-year sentence. Arrested in 1988 for his involvement in mass protests, he is the nation’s most celebrated songwriter whose resonant words and powerful voice pose an ongoing threat to the state. Forced to catch lizards to supplement his meager rations, Teza finds emotional and spiritual sustenance through memories and Buddhist meditation. The tiniest creatures and things–a burrowing ant, a copper-coloured spider, a fragment of newspaper within a cheroot filter–help to connect him to life…
$24.00
March 6, 2007
KAREN CONNELLY is the prize-winning author of eleven books of fiction, non-fiction and poetry, the most recent being Burmese Lessons, a memoir and a love story on the Thai-Burmese border that was nominated for a Governor General's Award and the British Columbia National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction. Her first novel, The Lizard Cage, won the Orange Broadband Prize for New Writers. Married with a young son, she divides her time between homes in rural Greece and Toronto.
