Brotherless Night: 'Blazingly brilliant' CELESTE NG

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The characters had to choose between staying with their family, or joining forces with those who they felt would make a better future for their families. 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. A fictional account that reads like a memoir, It is a tough story because so much of what occurs is not fiction. Her voice is one, that you will never forget, and as the reader you are forced again and again to ask yourself - What would you do?

For perhaps an even more bleak account of the Sri Lankan civil war, with a much narrower aperture of a short period of a few people caught in the conflict, I also highly recommend The Story of a Brief Marriage. The story is told in the first person by Sashi, which in my opinion, was an excllent decision by the author as, as far as it is possible, it felt like I was experiencing things along with her. This book is filled with emotional moments, and I got to have those moments without the narrator telling me how to feel.V.V Ganeshananthan finds a way to navigate a story of greys whilst keeping her characters grounded and complex. A heartbreaking exploration of a family fractured by civil war, this beautiful, nuanced novel follows a young doctor caught within conflicting ideologies as she tries to save lives. The whole thing centred around the attempts of the Tamil Tigers and their efforts to establish their rights. Desperate to act, she must ask herself: is it possible for anyone to move through life without doing harm? 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.

It did not occur to me to count or prove, to measure our losses for history or for other people to understand or believe. She] forces the reader to discard a binary description of the world in favor of a more complex, human one. Brotherless Night taught me that as an outsider, I'm quick to condemn others for acts of violence but ultimately what would I do if we were in that situation?And then I find a book like this and I realize that maybe it's okay because I'll find the ones I am truly meant to read. The book follows the life of its narrator, Sashikala Kulenthiren, who begins the story as a teenager living in the majority-Tamil city of Jaffna, near the northern tip of Sri Lanka, in 1981. Brotherless Night is my favorite kind of novel, one so rich and full of movement that it's only later I realize how much I have learned. Before I started reading Brotherless Night, I had read enough about the Sri Lankan civil war to know that the story would contain tragedy, as that war tore apart virtually every Tamil family in Sri Lanka.

So begins our time with Sashi, who is older and living in the US now, but telling us her story as it started in 1981 in Jaffna, when she was a teenager and the Sri Lankan civil war was just beginning. This is a dark novel about a brutal conflict – Shashi, her family and her community suffer tragedy after tragedy - but it is well written and very moving. Nearly all the men and boys in Sashi's life join the Tamil Tigers and pain and loss become her only constants. Her work has appeared in Granta, The New York Times, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, among other publications.The book is mostly set in the Tamil city of Jaffna and told in the first person by a woman named Sashikala (Sashi) Kulenthiren who is 15 when it starts and on track to attend medical school--which she eventually does. We slowly see how the conflict breaks families and creates families , it breaks ideals and creates new purpose. We follow her, her brothers and their friend K (her secret crush) as they all encounter Black July in Colombo - a pogrom of the Tamil people by the Sinhalese.

I will be pressing Brotherless Night into everyone's hands, because you need to read this book immediately. 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.Ethnic violence by the Sinhalese against the Tamil resulted in a backlash; the Tamil Tigers arose, over time becoming equally as fearsome in their civilian attacks. As a reader I was brought along on Sashi's journey and was with her through her experiences living in Sri Lanka during a civil war in the 1980's. 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.