The Narrow Road to the Deep North is the story of a surgeon who endures time in a Japanese PoW camp in WWII, helping to oversee the brutal construction of the "Burma Death Railway". He's a complex man who becomes regarded as a great hero almost despite himself. The narrative moves forwards and backwards in time, telescoping the years brilliantly, examining how the defining relationship of his life changes everything that follows. The book works on multiple levels. It's especially good at conveying the utter wretchedness of life in the PoW camp – the insane cruelty that somehow became ordinary routine. It takes an elegiac tone as it follows up on various lives after the war ended, showing that for many of the individuals scarred by these experiences it never really ended at all.
It's a deep book that takes some getting into – moving slowly in places and then racing through the years in other sections. It's a wise book, too, understanding that the moral choices we make are never simple.
As a work of literary construction it's impressive. It won the won the 2014
Booker Prize and you can see why. It's not "difficult", by any means (although you might want to look away during some scenes of brutality), but it's rich enough that you would probably get more out of it on a second reading.
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