We were not safe, Appa meant; he could not protect us. But I did not need him to tell me. I had known from the moment Dayalan returned to our house without his bicycle.

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. When we return to New York two decades later we've begun to understand how the Tamil 'terrorists' defy this label as much as any other. Ganeshanathan triumphs in her portrait of them as complex individuals - 'people you might know or love' SpectatorThis 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. At the beginning of Brotherless Night, readers meet the protagonist, Sashi, a young Tamil girl growing up in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, along with her four brothers. Part of a tight-knit family, Sashi hopes to train as a doctor, like her oldest brother, so her days are full of studying interrupted only by a crush on another brother’s cute friend. But when Sri Lanka starts to descend into a civil war, the boundaries of Sashi’s comfortable life, as well as those of her brothers, are completely redrawn. Throughout the ensuing violence, Sashi struggles to learn how to care for others as a physician and bear witness to the atrocities committed by all parties involved in the war.

Ganeshananthan has created a slow-burning and beautifully written debut in Love Marriage. It is an evocative examination of Sri Lankan cultural mores, and the way one family is affected by love and war”— The Financial Times AM: The story reflects on the subject of women in wartime. There are plenty of strong female characters, including Sashi herself. There is a feminist reading group at the university that Sashi joins, where they read Kumari Jayawardena’s Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World. One of the unauthorised Reports that circulate is about sexual violence and the status of women; it calls Tamil society to account for its conservative posture towards women. And the story unflinchingly covers the brutal fact of rape during wartime, including by the Indian peacekeeping forces. Can you say something about why this subject is so important? 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 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! Where is K? Where is he?” Seelan said more urgently, and then they realised that none of them knew.

Author Q&A

My father nodded. “Be careful,” he said, his voice low. He held Niranjan’s arm and then released him. 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… 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. This account of man’s injustices to his fellow man is beautifully written and engrossing. The author writes of unimaginable atrocities with sensitivity and pathos. Despite the wrenching honesty of the novel, the strength of those who survive is powerful and somehow uplifting.

I find this is a difficult book to summarize and even more difficult to rate. I will also mention that I was listening to this book first while traveling through Laos, a country obliterated in a war they were not even party to, and where people are still regularly maimed and killed by unexploded clusterbombs 50 years after the end of the secret war and later in Vietnam, and I imagine that the setting impacted my read. 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. In Ukraine, as in other wars, the full history will take years to tell and it will be told by women." The Los Angeles Times. December 27, 2022. SP: You mentioned that you want to reach Tamil readers specifically, and I would love to hear more about that. What do you hope that they will take away from this?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.” Riveting, heartbreaking and extraordinary . . . Brotherless Night is a masterpiece.” — Minneapolis Star Tribune Rather than sort of pursue a political agenda, first I think that the point is to have good fiction, and if some sort of statement about morality emerges from that, that’s great. But my priority was to make a story that revealed something, and I didn’t necessarily want what it was revealing to be so plain. The daughter of Sri Lankan immigrants who left their collapsing country and married in America, Yalini finds herself caught between the traditions of her ancestors and the lure of her own modern world. But when she is summoned to Toronto to help care for her dying uncle, Kumaran, a former member of the militant Tamil Tigers, Yalini is forced to see that violence is not a relic of the Sri Lankan past, but very much a part of her Western present.

In spite of these grave difficulties, the novel charts Sashi’s growth into political consciousness. She fulfills her departed brother’s dream by eventually matriculating in the medical college at Jaffna. While at medical school, she is recruited by K to provide medical assistance at a clinic run by the Tigers. As Sashi gets more intimately acquainted with the operations of the Tigers, she is increasingly disillusioned by their unethical actions, their hunger for power, killing of members of other Tamil militant groups, and ruthless crushing of all dissent. She realizes that her own brother, Dayalan, is complicit in these atrocities.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. 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. I tend to read classics. Why? Because the probability is high that they are good. A classic must pass the test of time. I bet my bottom dollar that this book will one day become a classic. It’s that good! The book came out this year, at the start of 2023! It makes clear to me that excellent literature is being written today. 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.