Brotherless Night

Product Information

Of course, I don’t think I can say — as some people have said — that this was a war without witness or that nobody knows the stories. Obviously, that’s not true, because there were people there who witnessed it, and they’re Sri Lankan. And there are people who know these stories, and they’re Sri Lankan, too. And those were the people who told me these stories. Those were the people who wrote down these stories, so they were in books for me to find. V. V. Ganeshananthan has given us a riveting picture of the intersections of love and war that shape us all. A debut of incredible passion and wisdom.” 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. 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. Brotherless Night succeeds in telling all its stories—the historical and the personal, the factual and the ethical—as one, and that narrative has echoes. . . . 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.” —The New Yorker

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. 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

Author Q&A

Perhaps Ganeshananthan’s finest achievement in Brotherless Night is showing, with meticulous accuracy, what it feels like to inhabit a day-to-day life onto which someone else, from the privilege of great distance, can throw a word like 'terrorism,' and be done." — New York Times 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.” 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. 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…

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. 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 And when Sashi meets up with K again after years of separation, Ganeshananthan is able to conjure the young couple’s longing through a single touch: “He reached out and wrapped his fingers around mine, so that we were walking and holding hands, and I wondered if anyone could see us, if I wanted that, if it would matter if someone saw, and then I knew that no one could, because if anyone could, he would never have done it. This stolen, safe hour could not last.”

Retailers:

The author does a very good job of explaining the Sri Lankan civil war, which most people outside the region know little about, and I appreciated her historical rigor. I also appreciated the author's restraint. This book is filled with emotional moments, and I got to have those moments without the narrator telling me how to feel. As people lose family members and spouses, as they watch beloved people die by choice for the cause a lesser writer would have described their pain and sadness in great detail. But why? As a reader I don't want to read about feeling, I want to feel. The steadiness of the prose (which is not to say that it is cold or detached, just not overwrought) made me imagine and inhabit moments that I would have guessed were unimaginable. Empathy rather than schmaltz is a good thing. 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. A beautiful, brilliant book... 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 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