Brotherless Night

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Brotherless Night is my favorite kind of novel, one so rich and full of movement that it’s only later I realize how much I have learned. V. V. Ganeshananthan drew me in from the very first line, and the intricacies of her characters’ lives made it easy to stay.” —Sara Nović, New York Times bestselling author of True Biz In the middle of all this, as Sashi is studying to become a doctor, there’s Seelan’s friend K, with whom Sashi’s relationship is neither romantic nor wholly platonic. K is the novel’s agent of chaos. He is the harbinger of transformation (even his first encounter with Sashi, thrillingly recounted in the first chapter, changes how she looks at herself) and that necessarily includes destruction. In Sashi, we see someone who gathers strength, specifically from her friendships with other women, and also from her own mother, from her grandmother. And a lot of the kind of quiet acts of care that make the society able to continue — in some form — during this intense period of conflict come from civilians, come from women, come from civil institutions, like universities, like hospitals, right, like libraries.” Reading and writing Many thanks to the author, Random House Publishing Group and NetGalley for the digital ARC of this exceptionally well-written novel. All opinions expressed in this review are my own. Hundreds of thousands of civilians were caught between the armies while the United Nations and the world watched without sending aid.

Brotherless Night is an absolute triumph. It is a masterpiece, giving us one woman's perspective of the Sri Lankan Civil War, and simultaneously showing us how in that one perspective lies everything. It is the story of coming of age into a world that becomes increasingly fragmented and horrific, where every lesson comes at a painful cost, and every lovely memory seems to exact an exorbitant price. And yet despite the pain, there is so much beauty in this book, at a fundamental, granular level. Every sentence is stunning, bringing a complicated world and unforgettable characters to life.Both sides commit atrocities, and Sashi is enraged by her older brothers’ defense of brutality as necessary for their cause. “Brotherless Night” shows a family tested by political beliefs and the realities of war. It's a book about love in all its facets. It's about family, education and medicine and about the power of writing. But most of all, Ganeshananthan says, it's about the vital roles women quietly play in society.

This is a book of historical fiction. It's about the Sri Lankan War. The war began in 1983. On May 18, 2009, President Mahinda Rajapaksa declared its end. Twenty-six years it took. Over one million were killed and millions of Sri Lankans, mainly minority Tamils, were displaced as refugees both inside the country and abroad. SP: So, for people like me who love this book and want to understand the context even better, what are some of the top next books you would point us toward?It is not new to see lives obliterated by war. In “Brotherless Night” this pain is strikingly brought to life through the eyes of Sashi, a beautifully realized character who reminds us horror is often suffered by humanity in places not necessarily illuminated by our newsfeed or social media trends. VG: Well, I think that because she was the only woman among the four [authors of The Broken Palmyra], naturally I look to her as an example of someone who was intensely principled and also clearly a really powerful storyteller. My own father is a physician, and I also know a lot of Sri Lankan doctors, probably most of whom are Tamil. I spent some time reading about those experiences. Things like the hospital massacre did occur, for example, but there were lots of precarious situations of people treating other people. And she in particular, because she was the professor of anatomy, had this outsized influence on the students. When I think about the ways that doctors communicate care, I think there’s a lot in common with the things that I care about and want to pay attention to. And the doctors that I respect the most are looking at people holistically, which also seemed like something that that she was doing, and specifically caring for women, specifically noting the experiences of women in her community related to sexual violence. Innovative….this is an ambitious family drama about an underreported part of the world, filled with well-shaded characters [and] gorgeous flourish…Buy it."— New York Magazine

Ganeshananthan is a superb writer...I wept at many points in this novel and I also wept when it was over' Sunday Times Suketu Mehta is a fiction writer and journalist based in New York. He has won the Whiting Writers Award, the O. Henry Prize, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for his fiction. He is the author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, and his other work has been published in the New York Times Magazine, Granta, Harper’s magazine, Time, Conde Nast Traveler, and The Village Voice and has been featured on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. In 2021, she learned she has a debilitating motor disability in her hands, which makes it hard for her to write. For a while, she used voice recognition software, but she says that while it's good for composition, it's terrible for revision.VG: I can’t think of many Sri Lankan families the war has not affected. Sure, the war has affected my family. My father in particular comes from Jaffna, and Jaffna has of course been incredibly affected by the war. My father left Sri Lanka because he anticipated this violence. But those who are really affected are those who were left behind.

I want you to understand: it does not matter if you cannot imagine the future. Still, relentless, it comes.” With immense compassion and deep moral complexity, V. V. Ganeshananthan brings us an achingly moving portrait of individual and societal grief. " I want you to understand," the narrator of BROTHERLESS NIGHT insists, and by the end of this blazingly brilliant novel, we do: that in a world full of turmoil, human connections and shared stories can teach us how - and as importantly, why - to survive" CELESTE NG, bestselling author of LITTLE FIRES EVERYWHERE

VVG: The language of terrorism has been something that I’ve seen batted around about my community since long before 9/11. But I started writing this book after 9/11, when the Sri Lankan government started using post-9/11 language about the War on Terror. After 9/11, that was how the Sri Lankan government presented the civil war to the international community, as a war on terrorism. It was a way for them to get increased support. That language was something that I’d spent a lot of time thinking about and something that I wanted to contest because — and I’m sure this is something someone else said to me first — I have a hard time using the term terrorism if we’re not also going to talk about state terrorism, which is something we see a great deal in this world. VG: It was really hard, and there are certainly things I wish I could have included that somehow didn’t fit. If it wasn’t organic to the narrative, it didn’t necessarily happen. The family in the book is a Jaffna Tamil family, and so there isn’t, for example, really the voice of the Sri Lankan Muslim in the novel. VG: I think it’s easy to pay attention to people who are engaged in combat, and those are frequently men. In the case of the Tigers, there was also a women’s wing, and there has been some attention paid to that. That makes sense, but I think the brunt of the war was really faced by civilian women who were displaced, who were resisting militarization. I’ve seen its impact, and writing about the impact of militarization on civil life was very important to me. It seemed like a logical way to do that, in a way that would mean a lot to me, would be to write about it through experiences of women whose homes and families were ruptured by the militarization of the state, the militarization of Tamil militants, the militarization of so-called Indian peacekeepers, who were also responsible for committing some atrocities during that time. I also felt it had not really been written about, at least not very much in the lens of fiction. A heartbreaking exploration of a family fractured by civil war, this beautiful, nuanced novel follows a young doctor caught within conflicting ideologies as she tries to save lives. I couldn’t put this book down.” —Brit Bennett, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Vanishing Half Imagine the places you grew up, the places you studied, places that belonged to your people, burned. But I should stop pretending that I know you. Perhaps you do not have to imagine. Perhaps your library, too, went up in smoke.”