Brotherless Night

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While Kumaran’s loved ones gather around him to say goodbye, Yalini traces her family’s roots–and the conflicts facing them as ethnic Tamils–through a series of marriages. Now, as Kumaran’s death and his daughter’s politically motivated nuptials edge closer, Yalini must decide where she stands. Retro Active: Bill Clinton can still work a crowd like no other Democrat -- which is both a good and bad thing." The American Prospect. September 16, 2003. 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 Where is K? Where is he?” Seelan said more urgently, and then they realised that none of them knew. I will be pressing Brotherless Night into everyone's hands, because you need to read this book immediately.

Ganeshananthan worked on Brotherless Night for nearly 20 years before its publication on January 3, 2023. [6] The novel follows sixteen-year-old Sashikala "Sashi" whose dream of becoming a doctor is disrupted when her four brothers are swept up by the early years of the Sri Lankan Civil War. Sashi begins work at a field hospital for the minority Tamil militants before she is convinced by a feminist Tamil medical school professor to join her dangerous journey documenting human rights violations. [7] Bibliography [ edit ] Books [ edit ] 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. 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 Sashi's family is part of the Tamil minority, and as the bloody violence erupts, each of her brothers is pulled in different ways into the fight. Women in war

Author Q&A

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 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. SM: This is a very complicated political stew. How do you take all of this and turn it into literature? How do you deal with politics like this and have characters who are political without turning didactic, which your novel clearly is not? How do you pull that off ? One of the things people always talk about with regard to Sri Lanka is which people were there first. And I think that’s a little bit besides the point, because both sets of people, the Tamils and the Sinhalese (who are not even the only two peoples involved in the conflict) really have been there for thousands of years. And then you have other populations: the Indian Tamils or the tea estate Tamils, and then also the Muslim population, which is Tamil-speaking, and you have Burghers, with their mixed European ancestry–so you really have a whole bunch of different populations. And I think if you’re going to talk about who was there longest and that being the reason that you have a claim, then all over the world you’ve got big problems with the feasibility of restoring everyone to where they were first. It’s not really a way to lay claim to land, necessarily. Ganeshananthan is a superb writer...I wept at many points in this novel and I also wept when it was over Sunday Times

A courageous young Sri Lankan woman tries to protect her dream of becoming a doctor in this “heartbreaking exploration of a family fractured by civil war” (Brit Bennett, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Vanishing Half). Ganeshananthan is a superb writer...I wept at many points in this novel and I also wept when it was over' Sunday Times Talking about the passage in question, Ganeshananthan says that as a university professor (she teaches creative writing at the University of Minnesota, US), she had expected the scene to be much easier to write. “That scene took a while to get to its final form, which is funny because I have been teaching for a long time and this (the study circle) is essentially a discussion at a university seminar. It’s intense and it’s tragic at some level but I also feel like it’s one of the funnier scenes in the novel,” Ganeshananthan says, adding, “I am Sri Lankan, I am Tamil and I am a part of the diaspora. I too have entered a room and wondered who the other Sri Lankans are.” Also Read: This new book takes the reader to writer Gopinath Mohanty’s OdishaPoignant and authentic…. Insight gained into Toronto’s Tamil community is a welcome bonus in this gem of a book by a young writer who is sure to present more thought-provoking, entertaining prose in the future.”— The Toronto Star A beautiful, brilliant book - it gives an accounting of the unimaginable losses suffered by a family and by a country, but it is as tender and fierce as it is mournful. It is unafraid to look directly at the worst of the violence and erasure we have perpetrated or allowed to happen, but is insistent that we can still choose to be better Danielle Evans, author of The Office of Historical Corrections Lynne, a GR friend, recommended this to me. I trust her opinion. Once again, her advice has proved to be right! 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. At its best and simplest, Ganeshananthan can be profoundly moving. She captures the pain of exile poignantly.”— The San Francisco Chronicle

In the works for well over a decade, Brotherless Nightand the events it describes were partially inspired by a non-fiction book called The Broken Palmyra, first published in 1989. Written by four academics from the University of Jaffna (one of whom has inspired a character in Ganeshananthan’s novel), the book was an insiders’ account of the Tamil crisis in Sri Lanka and also documented the human rights violations carried out by the Sri Lankan government. Also Read: The parallel worlds of Mridula Garg’s womenEveryone was going in the other direction, Niranjan told me later. I was trying to swim against a tide.