I became aware of Brotherless Night when it was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2024, the winner of which will be announced at 6.45pm GMT on June 13th, 2024.

When I read that it was about a young woman in Sri Lanka, in the time of approaching civil war, I recalled reading Nayomi Munaweera’s excellent Island of a Thousand Mirrors (my review here), a book about families and divisions, as well as belonging – how human beings continue to perpetuate separation and difference and make it dangerous, fearful and forbidden to pursue union and friendship, due to backgrounds and ethnic differences. Two families from different ethnic origins, living up and downstairs from each other…and so the story will unfold, as another generation is compromised.

Long simmering ethnic tensions and perceptions of injustice against the government lead to a civil war that pitted one group of people against the other, Buddhist Singhalese and Hindu Tamil.

A Family and A Country Set to Lose

Brotherless Night is narrated from the perspective of Sashi, from 1981-1989, the long, tumultuous, violent years of the civil war, fought between the Sinhalese-dominated state and Tamil separatist groups (bookended by chapters set in New York 2009).

It is mainly set in the city of Jaffna, where the young protagonist of a Tamil family lives, with some chapters set in the capital Colombo.

At sixteen, Sashi wants to become a doctor like her older brother. She has four brothers, all with different ambitions, three older and one younger. Their father Appa, a government surveyor, is travelling and rarely at home unless given leave.

The story opens when one of their friends K, hears Sashi’s screams as she spills hot water on herself and drops his bicycle and comes inside and tends to her burn. He is in her third brother Seelan’s class, also destined for medical school. His life will take a different direction, becoming further entwined with hers and her brothers.

Awakening to Irreparable Adult Conflict

The novel traces the beginnings of their pursuit of their dreams and the slow unravelling as the country erupts and young Tamil men are both recruited and sometimes snatched to join “the cause”.

A book sat on her brother’s shelf, an old bestseller about the 1958 anti-Tamil riots, one he read after being present at an international conference on Tamil language and culture where police had fired into the audience.

At sixteen I still hadn’t touched Emergency ’58 but I knew it was a brutal testimony to Sri Lanka’s willingness to slaughter its own Tamil citizens. My father’s slim, battered copy of the book had taken on the aura of something forbidden and terrifying. Did I need to read it to know that because we were ethnic minorities, Tamils were considered expendable?

It follows the effect on this particular family of the different choices people make, including the absent father and the daring mother. When two of the brothers join one of the militant groups, Sashi’s mother does everything to try and save the youngest son from becoming lost to them. When disaster arrives, she rallies ‘the mothers’ in one unforgettable episode that does make a difference, but won’t save them from what is coming.

The boys are challenged by their mother on a rare visit home, but are unable to provide responses to her unanswerable questions.

The Twisted Turns of Stunted Dreams

It is about the disruption of the dreams and the way they can swerve when disasters occur; about the effect on families and youth of political ideologies and both the difficulty and dangers of resisting; the futility of judgement, of regret.

I did not wait. Neither did the war. It was with us now. Since Dayalan and Seelan would not tell us, I went out and asked my friends what they had heard or knew, and in that way began to collect information about the new lives people were choosing. Were they responding to the war or were they making it? Boys joined in droves; the ranks of the militant groups swelled. Almost every week now one of our neighbours told Amma about those they knew who were going. People spoke about it more and more freely. Some of the parents were proud. “What did we expect them to do, after all,” said Jega Uncle, Saras Aunty’s husband. His nephew had joined. “After what they did in Colombo, how did they expect us to react?”

How to Survive

Perhaps education is one of the few ways that youth can escape a world in turmoil, but even that is no guarantee. So many have little choice or are made to choose between life and death, no choice at all.

Stories that involve families, their experiences, their losses, their small wins, their deep hurts, their bravery and failures perhaps tell us more than what media news stories depict, where money, power and political influence dictate. The lives of families, of mothers and sons and daughters come from the heart, from a desire to want them to survive and thrive.

Thoroughly researched and humanely presented, while not holding back from expressing its fury, this novel will make many readers grateful for the simplicity of their own lives and realise the ease with which they are able to pursue it and the banality of our own carefree decision-making, compared to the complicated conflict too many today are born into.

Highly Recommended.

“I was interested in writing about the gray space between militarized societies and questions of choice and coercion,” V.V. Ganeshananthan, in an interview with Here & Now‘s Deepa Fernandes

Further Reading

wbur Interview: ‘Brotherless Night’ explores Sri Lanka’s civil war through stories of family by Deepa Fernandes

NPR: ‘Brotherless Night,’ an ambitious novel about Sri Lankan civil war, wins $150K Carol Shields prize

The Guardian: Brotherless Night by V.V Ganeshananthan review – heartbreak in war-torn Sri Lanka by Yagnishsing Dawoor – excerpt below.

The novel has the intimacy of a memoir, the urgency of reportage, and the sweep and scale of the epic. It occasionally employs the second person to address the reader. In this, it sits somewhere between plea and testimony. And while the revelations are distressing, the narration itself is buoyed up by a rare and robust emotional force. Ganeshananthan’s prose is rich, eloquent, utterly unsparing. “The war,” Sashi tells us, “offered us only tight quarters.”