Brotherless Night

Product Information

VG: My parents are Ceylon Tamils, which means that my mother’s uørand my father’s uørare both in Jaffna. My parents came to the United States in the 1970s, and there was quite a wave of immigration then. That’s very anecdotal, but my father, and my father’s classmates from medical school, many of them emigrated around that time.

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. Sashi's family is part of the Tamil minority, and as the bloody violence erupts, each of her brothers is pulled in different ways into the fight. Women in war SM: How do they live there? How do your relatives actually live there? Day to day with all the bombings and the kidnappings? How do they go to school and shop for groceries? How do they do all the things that people do in cities? Where is K? Where is he?” Seelan said more urgently, and then they realised that none of them knew.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. Many thanks to the author, Random House Publishing Group and NetGalley for the digital ARC of this exceptionally well-written novel. All opinions expressed in this review are my own. 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.

SM: What’s your impression of the Tamil Tigers? Now they’re considered a terrorist group by the States and the European Union. And mainly people in the Tamil areas of Sri Lanka and among the Tamil diaspora–not just Sri Lankan Tamils but also Indian Tamils consider them freedom fighters. What’s your impression of this group? 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. VG: Like anyone who loves research, I can always think of things that I wish had gone in. It’s always an act of careful storytelling restraint to put in the things that the characters need and not just everything you love and care about. I kind of wish that I had started knowing how long it would take, but who ever does anything that way? Not me! It was tremendously satisfying to do that research and to hear a lot of people talk about their experiences. A lot of really powerful novels that are set in Sri Lanka talk about the run-up to the war or focus on specific periods, and this particular period and this particular setting are not that traveled ground. And also, specifically to write about women in that place and that time is very important to me. 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 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?

Sashi's storytelling is a perfect fit for the delicate balance she is forced to walk by virtue of living in a society where running afoul of the dominant forces, saying the wrong thing, leveling too impassioned a rebuke, can prove a capital offense Omar El Akkad, New York Times Book Review SP: I loved all the emotional appeals you made to your readers. Can you speak more to writing from such an intimate perspective and why you made that choice? 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. VG: I was reading online a story by one news agency, the AFP, that put the date at 1972, and the Associated Press, whose coverage I really admire, usually puts the date at 1983. 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.”

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.Riveting, heartbreaking and extraordinary for both its empathetic gaze and its clear-eyed depiction of the brutality of war, Brotherless Night is a masterpiece Star Tribune 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. And I think I often have said to my students ‘read your work aloud to yourself,’ but, like any teacher, I am sometimes a hypocrite. And so, in this instance, I had the great benefit of: No, I was forced to do that. And I think that that also just kind of turned the screws on the prose.” Brotherless Night tells the story of Sashi, a medical student, and her family, including four brothers, who are caught up in the unrest, violence, and ultimately, war in Sri Lanka in the 1980s. They are Tamil in a majority Sinhalese country. Sashi adores her brothers, three of whom become involved with the organization working for Tamil independence. New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice •A courageous young Sri Lankan woman tries to protect her dream of becoming a doctor in this “heartbreaking exploration of a family fractured by civil war” (Brit Bennett, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Vanishing Half).