Brotherless Night: 'Blazingly brilliant' CELESTE NG

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The story begins just before the Sri Lankan civil war starts as the discrimination against Tamils is growing culminating in the "Black July" pogroms against the Tamils in the summer of 1983. Brotherless Night is a beautiful and heartbreaking and powerful novel about one girl’s coming-of-age during the Sri Lankan civil war. who leaves medical school to become a leader in the Tamil Tigers and Anjali a medical school professor and highly principled human rights activist (evidently based on a real person).

This beautiful, nuanced novel follows a young doctor caught within conflicting ideologies as she tries to save lives. Not only do I need to learn more about the history of this event, it makes me wonder what other earth-shattering skirmishes I've missed in my own lifetime.I often do not love historical fiction because it bends real and momentous events to fit some ultimately tiny story.

This book is filled with emotional moments, and I got to have those moments without the narrator telling me how to feel. Fleeing to survive, Sashi agrees to work as a medic at a field hospital for one of the fighting military factions.This is a book that feels like a whole world, filled with vital questions and the kind of wrenching heartbreak that stays with you long after the book has closed. She then becomes involved with a feminist project that documents human rights violations which changes her life forever. If you like novels about family, obstacles, real world themes and international cultures, Brotherless Night is a brilliant book for you! She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Minnesota and co-hosts the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast on Literary Hub, which is about the intersection of literature and the news.

Shashi has four brothers, we meet them as a family when they all have dreams - of going to University in Jaffna or in Colombo, of becoming doctors, engineers etc.

V. Ganeshananthan has been one of those books where the more I think about it, the more I like it and I keep thinking about it. Living in our western cocoon of comfort and security we find it difficult to understand the relentless suffering of so many in other parts of the world. Initially, I was a little put off by the very linear structure to the story, but over time, I came to appreciate it.

The young Tamil men who routinely torture and kill in the name of her people are not strangers, nor are the Sri Lankan government officials committing the atrocities that fuel these militants’ destruction. When requests come from the militants — to pay them taxes, to move houses — it would essentially be suicide to refuse. Quote from a revered teacher: "Open your books, read while you can, and remember: there are people in our country who would burn what we love and laugh at the flames. I know reading is for fun, I review books on the internet in my spare time for enjoyment (and sometimes for free books), it's something I choose to do, I'm not in school anymore, etc etc.I loved the way the author pulled you in and occasionally just turned to as if you were just sitting there with her. What follows is a history of the first ten years of the Sri Lankan Civil War told through the lens of one Tamil woman caught in the middle.