Brotherless Night

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Poignant 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 The outsider-geeks of the Dean campaign join forces with Al Gore, the most mainstream geek in American politics." The American Prospect. December 11, 2003. Your question very generously asks me about my choice and again, here, there was a lot of subconscious work going on. I don’t know how much I consciously chose her, and how much she sort of showed up and started bossing things around. Which, again, was very fortunate for me. I knew I was interested in medicine and that’s always been the case. There’s medicine in my first novel as well. And so that gave me a hook to hang my hat on and something that she wanted which had an arc, an educational arc. That was the thing I knew was going to go awry. Lynne, a GR friend, recommended this to me. I trust her opinion. Once again, her advice has proved to be right!

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. My father nodded. “Be careful,” he said, his voice low. He held Niranjan’s arm and then released him. V. V. Ganeshananthan: It took me a long time to understand anything about the origins of the conflict. I think that when you’re a kid and your parents tell you a certain set of stories, and parts of those stories are true and maybe also parts of those stories are colored by their perspectives a little–which isn’t to say what my parents told me wasn’t true–but it wasn’t exactly the only truth there was. So one of the things I did when I was researching the book was to read a whole bunch of books about Sri Lanka and to try and figure out exactly what historians thought was the defining truth. Brotherless Night is an absolute must-read and a story that I will not be forgetting any time soon. V.V. Ganeshananthan did a masterful job not only crafting this story and setting but also with her characterization. I highly recommend Brotherless Night to all! One of the novel’s big themes is the idea of multiple allegiances. Two of Sashi’s brothers end up joining the Tamil Tigers. As a medical student, she herself agrees to work at a field hospital to treat Tiger cadres. But she does not agree with their authoritarianism, nor their blatant targeting of other rebel groups as well as civilians they consider “traitors” (and as the novel shows us, this happens with increasingly smaller excuses/justifications provided).

Jaffna, 1981. Sixteen-year-old Sashi wants to become a doctor. But over the next decade, a vicious civil war tears through her home, and her dream spins off course as she sees her four beloved brothers and their friend K swept up in the mounting violence. Desperate to act, Sashi accepts K’s invitation to work as a medic at a field hospital for the militant Tamil Tigers, who, following years of state discrimination and violence, are fighting for a separate homeland for Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority. But after the Tigers murder one of her teachers and Indian peacekeepers arrive only to commit further atrocities, Sashi begins to question where she stands. When one of her medical school professors, a Tamil feminist and dissident, invites her to join a secret project documenting human rights violations, she embarks on a dangerous path that will change her forever. SM: What’s your personal stake in the book? It comes through, the passion that you have, the feeling for the characters. How necessary was this book for you to write?

Quote from a revered teacher: "Open your books, read while you can, and remember: there are people in our country who would burn what we love and laugh at the flames. " Brotherless Night tells the story of Sashi, a medical student, and her family, including four brothers, who are caught up in the unrest, violence, and ultimately, war in Sri Lanka in the 1980s. They are Tamil in a majority Sinhalese country. Sashi adores her brothers, three of whom become involved with the organization working for Tamil independence. I will be pressing Brotherless Night into everyone's hands, because you need to read this book immediately. 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. 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 MagazineRiveting, heartbreaking and extraordinary . . . Brotherless Night is a masterpiece.” — Minneapolis Star Tribune I rate this historical fiction book a solid 4 stars. It is set during the Sri Lankan civil war, between the Sinhalese majority and the Tamil minority. The war lasts more than 25 years. The book centers on one Tamil family and how the vicious war affects them. Both sides kill and torture civilians. The narrator is 16 year old Sashi in 1981. She wants to be a doctor, a very difficult goal in a male dominated society. VG: Yeah, I guess I’m imagining on the other end, hopefully, people who are Sri Lankan diaspora. I hope that this has special resonance for them. I hope that they’re not the only readers, but I think that many of them will find levels of meaning in it that other folks won’t.