No Country

In November 1989 an immigrant couple are discovered murdered in a small town in upstate New York. They lie together as though just disengaged from a long embrace. These killings have been two centuries in the making.

County Sligo, Ireland, 1843. Brendan McCarthaigh and his best friend Padraig are seventeen and have everything ahead of them. Brendan is in love with books and and Padraig is madly in love with black-haired Brigid. But when Father Conlon sees Padraig and Brigid kissing, the lives of these three young people will be changed forever. A terrible twist of fate takes Padraig across the seas to Bengal and another kind of fate takes Brendan on an Irish Famine ship to Canada. The repercussions of these lives torn apart will echo through the generations to come.

From Ireland and England to India, Italy, Poland and North America - the tides of history sweep people across continents. Weaving together private histories and historical personalities, through betrayals and friendships, through riots and terrorism on the Indian subcontinent, a Russian pogrom and the Triangle fire in New York City, we are inexorably lead towards the terrible intimacy of that murder in a sleepy town.

Kalyan Ray has crafted a sweeping, epic, multigenerational saga of the diaspora over two centuries and three continents. No Country is a rich, compelling story of what is past, passing, or to come, and the few intimate degrees of separation that lie between love and murder.