I loved this story. I feel guilty that I have never heard of this civil war in Sri Lanka or the plight of the Tamil people. It is a story of what happens when a minority group is treated as second-class citizens. It's similar to what's happening in Myanmar, Palestine, the Sudan, and many other places worldwide. This particular story focuses on women and their roles as civilians while being related to terrorists and resistance fighters. This book would be an excellent choice for a book club.

Set during Sri Lanka’s civil war, V.V. Ganeshananthan’s BROTHERLESS NIGHT follows a young woman, Sashi, as she seeks to protect both her dreams of becoming a doctor and the lives of her loved ones in the wake of escalating violence and discrimination. As war rages around them, Sashi struggles to survive amidst death, fear, and endless brotherless nights, as she begins to lose the boys she loves the most. These boys—dead, or gone to join the Tamil Tigers and other militant groups fighting for a Tamil homeland, their changing values turning their leaving into another kind of loss, and a moral crisis for Sashi as she determines how she wants to resist, fight, and show her power. At the same time, she is clear that her condemnation of violence is a complicated thing, as all things are in impossible situations. “You must understand: that word, terrorist, is too simple for the history we have lived…” she says. “Whose stories will you believe? For how long will you listen?”

BROTHERLESS NIGHT is an invitation to question the narratives we are told, to restructure the course of history we have mapped out in our minds. It is a powerful tribute to the resistance and bravery of women. Most of all, it is an account of terrible things that happened to many people. As Sashi grieves, she says: “I wanted the four clean walls of my Jaffna childhood, the courtyard with its cup of sunlight, the small and dear lane where I had grown up. Give me a house that hasn’t burned, I thought: an upright home full of people who consider me precious.” I ached for her throughout this book, for the lost lives and futures and would-have-beens, for the ways that hate can make others forget that life should be treated as precious.

Sashi’s resilence and courage are miraculous; and yet I wished for another impossible miracle: to rewind the course of history, to un-burn libraries and markets and homes, to un-do death and starvation, to put the light back in young eyes, to erase blood from hands that were never meant to kill. Listening is a powerful thing, in that it is also a reminder that we cannot change the past, but amplify its stories and work to a changed future.

[Thanks to the publisher for a review copy. This is out now]

I couldn't put this down. It was incandescent. It was searing. It made my heart physically ache, and made me do a thousand searches for nonfiction follow-ups. I am 100% going to read Ganeshananthan's previous book. the writing for this just completely gripped me, and once I got going in earnest, it just snowballed. 

The family of the novel's protagonist Sashi is complex, and the book spends the entire time slowly unwinding the moral complexity of strongly held beliefs, and unravelling the word 'terrorist'. I was struck by the way Ganeshananthan made the entire cast of characters possible to understand, and you could see consistency of character even as motivation and ideologies changed. Truly can't wait to insist that everyone read this in 2023 and beyond. 

*Thanks to Random House, NetGalley for the ARC. Book release: 3 Jan 2023*