Brotherless Night

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Lynne, a GR friend, recommended this to me. I trust her opinion. Once again, her advice has proved to be right! She found a solution in the English department at the University of Minnesota, where she teaches. She engaged the help of two students as scribes. She says basically she read the entire book aloud to them, and they took down her revisions. With immense compassion and deep moral complexity, V. V. Ganeshananthan brings us an achingly moving portrait of individual and societal grief CELESTE NG, bestselling author of LITTLE FIRES EVERYWHERE V.V. Ganeshananthan: That required a lot of patience and humility because I was trying to earn their trust. And particularly with those who lived through that time period, that sort of trust in other people while telling those stories is not necessarily automatic, and for very good reason. It took many years to do the research, and a willingness to take that kind of time made these sorts of conversations possible.

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. Brotherless night is set in 1981 and takes place during the Sri Lankan civil way. The story centers around 16-year-old Sashi. Sashi dreams of becoming a doctor just like her eldest brother but after the violence of the war begins, her entire world and everything she knows turns upside down. 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.

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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. In both cases, I was presented with a very strong first-person voice I could just follow into the story. In that way, the process of writing was actually quite similar. My first novel was written under various kinds of guidance and supervision from other writers. Much of the first draft of Love Marriage was completed while I was in college and studying with Jamaica Kincaid, so she had a lot to do with how I thought about that book. Brotherless Night is a novel that I started as an MFA student, and then obviously, I completed it much later. So I had to learn how to work more independently after graduating and moving into the space of being a working writer. 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 So it’s been going on for about twenty-five years by most people’s count. But it’s important to realize that like any war, it’s the result of things that happened for decades before. The Sri Lankan government started discriminating against Tamils very shortly after the country gained independence from the British in the late 1940s. This has been well documented. The riots of 1958, for example. The war is really a culmination of previous events. It doesn’t justify the Tigers’ violence, but it does provide appropriate context.

The problem I have with the five star scale on Goodreads--or at least the way I rate books on it--is there is no way to distinguish "excellent" from "everyone must drop everything and read this book now." The five stars for Brotherless Night is more along the lines of the later. It is a devastatingly powerful, moving and complex portrayal Ganeshananthan is a superb writer...I wept at many points in this novel and I also wept when it was over Sunday TimesYou wait here for me,” Niranjan said, his face a stone. “There isn’t time to argue. Just listen for once, will you?” Then he turned to Dayalan and my father. Ganeshananthan’s first novel, Love Marriage (2008), was longlisted for the Orange Prize. Smart money says that before this year’s awards season is over, Brotherless Nightwill receive more than a few nominations as well. 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.

Lyrical and innovative, V. V. Ganeshananthan’s novel brilliantly unfolds how generations of struggle both form and fractures families. The title comes from night spent worrying about her missing oldest brother, Niranjan. He has gone to find a safe place for the family while Sinhalese rioters are murdering Tamil civilians. At its best and simplest, Ganeshananthan can be profoundly moving. She captures the pain of exile poignantly.”— The San Francisco ChronicleVVG: 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. Riveting, heartbreaking and extraordinary . . . Brotherless Night is a masterpiece.” — Minneapolis Star Tribune

She was the Zell Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Michigan through 2014. [2] In 2015, she began teaching at the University of Minnesota. [2] 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 Here there is no righteous way to fight a pure fight for justice. Sashi loses her brothers and friends to the Tamil Tigers, the revolutionary group rising up in response to the oppression forced upon them by the Sinhalese majority. As a medical student she is recruited to help but discovers the leaders stooping to tactics no better than the enemies they are fighting. 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).In this novel, I was transported deep into the experiences of civilians who are inspired to action, either to defend their people or to serve all people. They witness first hand terrorism and suffering, all the horror of war. Friends turn on friends, student against teacher, siblings are divided, families displaced. 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 Novic, New York Times bestselling author of TRUE BIZ