[1] The novel, written between 2011 and 2014, describes a day and a night in the lives of two young Tamils, Dinesh and Ganga, who are forced into a marriage as the Sri Lankan army intensifies its bombardment of the camp on the north-eastern coast where they are taking refuge.

"I grew up in the south of Sri Lanka in a well-off family, as insulated as someone could be from the war," Arudpragasam told Guernica magazine.

",[4] Novelist Colm Toibin praised Arudpragasam's dense and attentive style: "Every image in the book, including the most desolate, is rendered with precision and an aura of pure truth and tenderness.

",[5] Neera Majumdar of ThePrint wrote "The Story of a Brief Marriage is delicate, unsparing, and depicts the Sri Lankan civil war through the lens of the mortal human body.

of The Indian Wire,[13] Sarah Gilmartin of The Irish Times,[14] Supriya Nair of Mint[15] and Elizabeth Stark of The Rumpus.