Brotherless Night: 'Blazingly brilliant' CELESTE NG

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This book was impossible to put down; the prose — or maybe it’s more accurate to say Sashi’s voice — had a momentum that just reached out and gripped me and never let go. This is a beautiful, lyrical novel based on a sad and deadly chapter in history in Sir Lanka, South Asia. When one of her medical school professors, a Tamil feminist and dissident, invites her to join a secret project documenting human rights violations, she embarks on a dangerous path that will change her forever. It reads like a memoir, the narrator’s voice so direct and real, or a journalistic retelling of a true story. It's the type of book that will universalise and humanise many people towards a country that they might not normally think about.

Fairly early on in the book, a wave of anti-Tamil riots rips through Colombo, with Sinhalese mobs indiscriminately killing, raping, burning, looting and unleashing horror. The problem I have with the five star scale on Goodreads--or at least the way I rate books on it--is there is no way to distinguish "excellent" from "everyone must drop everything and read this book now. V. Ganeshananthan cast us as witnesses alongside Sashi to the scorched earth unfolding in the wake of the fight. I was entirely ignorant of events in Sri Lanka and I am ashamed now to remember being mostly annoyed by the inconvenience of being unable to get around freely. The novel begins before the war when Sashi and her brother and his friend K are preparing to study medicine, meeting up at the library.The reader watches as Sashi questions the means (brutality and murder) used by the Tamil Tigers, yet understands why her brothers have joined the group.

For now her focus is on passing her qualification exams to go to medical school -- a goal shared by her best friend and already reached by the maybe future boyfriend. In the ensuing years, even as almost everything and everyone she knows is either taken from her or rendered unrecognizable, Sashi refuses to let her own life fall apart. We witness Sashi’s life in the years before and during Sri Lanka’s brutal civil war — another term that imposes a binary divide on a conflict that the book rightly portrays as something far more fractured.

Ganeshananthan did a masterful job not only crafting this story and setting but also with her characterization. Her name is Anjali and she’s one of Sashi’s medical school professors AND she’s based on a real Sri Lankan woman and activist.