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. VG: Right. I think in the past couple of years there have been some four thousand people who have been killed or just disappeared. One thing that is very common right now in the north is for people to just be kidnapped. It’s even happened a couple of times in the capital. People disappear into white vans, which have become this sign of rogue elements of who knows what, maybe it’s the rebels, maybe it’s the government, and people are kidnapped. Oftentimes it is Tamil civilians who are being kidnapped. And a lot of them have actually been journalists.

VVG: This is a fair assessment. But to me, it’s important to note that that is in part. We do also see the characters — and specifically, the women — exercising different kinds of individual agency and collective agency as well, looking for and inventing ways of resisting the militarization of their society. Even as there are spaces in which they’re not sure what they get to choose, spaces where it’s unclear whether they’re choosing things or whether they’re being coerced, we do also see women gather for protests, for example. VG: Like anyone who loves research, I can always think of things that I wish had gone in. It’s always an act of careful storytelling restraint to put in the things that the characters need and not just everything you love and care about. I kind of wish that I had started knowing how long it would take, but who ever does anything that way? Not me! It was tremendously satisfying to do that research and to hear a lot of people talk about their experiences. A lot of really powerful novels that are set in Sri Lanka talk about the run-up to the war or focus on specific periods, and this particular period and this particular setting are not that traveled ground. And also, specifically to write about women in that place and that time is very important to me. Where is K? Where is he?” Seelan said more urgently, and then they realised that none of them knew. Ganeshananthan is a superb writer...I wept at many points in this novel and I also wept when it was over' Sunday Times 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 ]

Become a Member

A remarkable unflinching novel that delicately, with surgical precision, exposes the deep wound at the heart of a long cruel war Romesh Gunesekera, author of Reef VG: Yes. Often I don’t hear from them. I remember I mailed a letter to a cousin whose birthday it was one month, and she got the letter five months later after her birthday. And that’s a pretty mild example of what I mean. This book, a careful, vivid exploration of what’s lost within a community when life and thought collapse toward binary conflict, rang softly for me as a novel for our own country in this odd time.”—Nathan Heller, The New Yorker 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. In 1981 Jaffna, sixteen-year-old Sashikala “Sashi” Kulenthiren dreams of becoming a doctor just like her eldest brother Niranjan and her late grandfather who was a renowned physician in Colombo. But as the civil war in Sri Lanka intensifies and violence ensues between the warring factions- the Sinhalese government and the Tamil militants who are fighting for an independent state free of persecution of the Tamils, life as she has known it shall be changed forever. When one of her brothers loses his life in an act of anti-Tamil violence and two of her brothers and a family friend join the “movement” Sashi finds herself making choices and being drawn into a life she had never imagined for herself- a medical student also working as a medic for those serving in the movement. As she bears witness to the politics, the violence, and the activism of the 1980s she eventually embarks on exposing the true plight of civilians caught in the crossfire between the warring factions of the Sinhalese government, Tamil militants and the Indian peacekeeping forces through the written word with the help of one of her professors taking risks that could endanger her life and those of her associates.

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. I was fortunate that there are a lot of books about this time period, many of which are specifically in university libraries. And I’ve taught in universities off and on. I’ve taught college and university since basically the fall of 2008. I’ve had access to a lot of different libraries in different places, so I made use of that. Even before that, as a graduate student, I remember discovering the University of Iowa had an enormous number of books about Sri Lankan history, which was, for some reason, a surprise to me. And that was the moment I began to understand the capacity of university libraries, which I’m so grateful for. a careful, vivid exploration of what's lost within a community when life and thought collapse toward binary conflict [...] a novel for our own country in this odd time. New Yorker 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. 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]SM: How does the diaspora of the Sri Lankan Tamil community worldwide–there are a lot of them all over Europe and America–how do they carry on the memory of what has been lost? How do they deal with this not being able to return? My accountant is a Jaffna Tamil and he keeps describing a lost Eden… In the days after this, when Appa told me and Amma about those minutes of Niranjan disappearing and returning, first with Dayalan and Seelan and then again with Aran, and then leaving again to get K, his mouth trembled, and he had to stop several times because he was shaking too much to talk. When he regained himself, he said: What to do? What to do? As a boy, in a time of earlier communal trouble, my father had lived through his own brother disappearing. In his study there was a garlanded picture of my uncle, who was neither the first nor the last boy to be lost this way. 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.

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. 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.Sri Lankan-American author V.V. Ganeshananthan’s latest novel, her second, is a coming-of-age story that unfurls itself with expert pacing and remarkable depth of characterisation. Brotherless Nightfollows the fortunes of young Sashikala Kulenthiren, a Sri Lankan Tamil teenager in the early 1980s, as the country plunges into ever-escalating violence and blatant apartheid-like policies. Ganeshananthan will launch the book with a conversation with Curtis Sittenfeld at the Magers & Quinn bookstore in Minneapolis on Thursday, Jan. 26. It worked. The New York Times recently featured “Brotherless Night” as one of the big books of January. “Little Fires Everywhere” author Celeste Ng described it as “an achingly moving portrait of a world full of turmoil, but one in which human connections and shared stories can teach us how — and as importantly, why — to survive.”