Burmese lessons : a true love story

Summary: Orange Prizewinner Karen Connellys compelling memoir about her journey to Burma, where she fell in love with a leader of the Burmese rebel army. When Karen Connelly finds herself in Burma in the mid-nineties, she discovers the unexpected beauty and generosity of a people struggling under a brutal military dictatorship. Carefully seeking out the regimes resisters, she is swept into the streets, where she witnesses mass demonstrations, beatings, and arrests and she runs from the soldiers and riot police herself. When it gets too risky for her to stay, Connelly flies back to Thailand, but she cannot leave Burma behind. Then, at a Christmas party, she meets Maung, the handsome and charismatic leader of a guerrilla army fighting against the Burmese military machine. An unlikely romance develops, leading Connelly to join Maungs military camp in the jungle. Maung wants to transform the armed struggle into a dissident-focused political one. He also wants to marry Connelly and have a family with her. If she marries this man, she also weds his world and his lifelong cause. Taking the reader into a world as dangerous as it is enchanting, Connelly layers her radiant prose with passion, regret, sensuality, and humor. Burmese Lessons tells the story of how one woman came to love a wounded, remarkably beautiful country, and of a gifted man who has given his life to the struggle for change.

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