Brotherless Night

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SM: And this is your first book, and obviously it’s a deeply personal book because the path that your own family took is apparent in it. Novelists voyeur into invented worlds so it should not be read as biography or memoir– 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 ]

Both sides commit atrocities, and Sashi is enraged by her older brothers’ defense of brutality as necessary for their cause. “Brotherless Night” shows a family tested by political beliefs and the realities of war. It's a book about love in all its facets. It's about family, education and medicine and about the power of writing. But most of all, Ganeshananthan says, it's about the vital roles women quietly play in society. 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.

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She is a past vice president of the South Asian Journalists Association and now serves on the board of the Asian American Writers' Workshop, as well as on the graduate board of The Harvard Crimson. 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. 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: It was really hard, and there are certainly things I wish I could have included that somehow didn’t fit. If it wasn’t organic to the narrative, it didn’t necessarily happen. The family in the book is a Jaffna Tamil family, and so there isn’t, for example, really the voice of the Sri Lankan Muslim in the novel. V. V. "Sugi" Ganeshananthan (born 1980) [1] is an American fiction writer, essayist, and journalist of Ilankai Tamil descent. Her work has appeared in many leading newspapers and journals, including Granta, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Washington Post. The book takes us to a first-hand account of the horrors of war. As painful as this story is to read, it's even more frightening that this happened. Sri Lankans were a part of this horrific war that lasted three decades and never once did they receive any aid from the United Nations.There is a civil war going on in Sri Lanka in 1981- and sixteen-year-old Sashi reveals what it means to be swept up in the violence and confusion. The good guys are ruthless, people she loves take incredibly cruel actions, and Sashi finds that even following her conscience has regrettable consequences. Author V. V. Ganeshananthan cast us as witnesses alongside Sashi to the scorched earth unfolding in the wake of the fight. 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. I want you to understand: it does not matter if you cannot imagine the future. Still, relentless, it comes.” 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.” 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.