Burmese Lessons: A Love Story

• Karen Connelly
• Random House; 2009
• Hardcover; 480 pages
• 9780207256680

Burmese Lessons is a love story. Unlike conventional love stories, this one takes the reader into a world as dangerous and heartbreaking as it is enchanting.

When Karen Connelly finds herself in Burma in the late 1990s, she is immersed in a world of students staging mass demonstrations in opposition to Burma’s dictators, revolutionaries fighting an armed insurgency against that same military regime, and refugees living in hellish limbo in Thailand. Connelly first comes to love a wounded, remarkably beautiful country, then a gifted man who has given his life to its struggle for political change. Burmese Lessons is illuminated by the sensual language and flashes of humour that have won her fans around the world.


"Connelly is a sensualist, as a writer; this memoir is redolent with the smells of food, the stink of bodies, the weight of stones carried on her head as she helps the women in a camp. . . . Readers familiar with The Lizard Cage will experience several shocks of recognition of characters and images and ideas...especially the sweet wisdom of monks, and the fleeting encounter with a feral boy who becomes one of the most memorable characters in Canadian fiction."
— The Globe and Mail

"The enchanting story of a highly erotic love affair, one made wonky and dangerous by politics. . . . Connelly's personal loss has become her book's gain."
— Winnipeg Free Press

“[Karen Connelly] shows us what autobiography usually veils: the human spirit not at its most defiant and brave, but as it really is and can only be.”
— The New York Times


Karen Connelly is the author of nine books of non-fiction, fiction and poetry, the most recent being The Lizard Cage, which the New York Times Book Review compared to the works of Solzhenitsyn, Mandela and Orwell. Raised in Calgary, Connelly has lived for extended periods of time in different parts of Asia and Europe and now has two homes, one in Toronto and one in Greece.