In the days after this, when Appa told me and Amma about those minutes of Niranjan disappearing and returning, first with Dayalan and Seelan and then again with Aran, and then leaving again to get K, his mouth trembled, and he had to stop several times because he was shaking too much to talk. When he regained himself, he said: What to do? What to do? As a boy, in a time of earlier communal trouble, my father had lived through his own brother disappearing. In his study there was a garlanded picture of my uncle, who was neither the first nor the last boy to be lost this way. One of the novel’s big themes is the idea of multiple allegiances. Two of Sashi’s brothers end up joining the Tamil Tigers. As a medical student, she herself agrees to work at a field hospital to treat Tiger cadres. But she does not agree with their authoritarianism, nor their blatant targeting of other rebel groups as well as civilians they consider “traitors” (and as the novel shows us, this happens with increasingly smaller excuses/justifications provided).

Ganeshananthan has created a slow-burning and beautifully written debut in Love Marriage. It is an evocative examination of Sri Lankan cultural mores, and the way one family is affected by love and war”— The Financial Times SP: I loved it, and I did think it was interesting that it could serve both functions, depending on who’s reading it.SP: So, for people like me who love this book and want to understand the context even better, what are some of the top next books you would point us toward? 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.

A blazingly brilliant novel... With immense compassion and deep moral complexity, V. V. Ganeshananthan brings us 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.” —Celeste Ng, New York Times bestselling author of Little Fires Everywhere In 2021, she learned she has a debilitating motor disability in her hands, which makes it hard for her to write. For a while, she used voice recognition software, but she says that while it's good for composition, it's terrible for revision. 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.We meet the central protagonist, Sashi, at the age of sixteen. She spills boiling water over her body. A friend, passing by on the street, hears her screams. A medical student, he improvises, covering her burns with the whites of eggs. She too studies to become a doctor. To save lives, any person´s life, is what she wants to do. Her brothers are drawn into the Tamil Tigers terrorist movement. Saving life and terrorism are placed side by side. The exigencies of both are laid bare. Ganeshananthan will launch the book with a conversation with Curtis Sittenfeld at the Magers & Quinn bookstore in Minneapolis on Thursday, Jan. 26. AM: The book is a significant departure from your first novel, Love Marriage (2008), in both style and content. Can you say something about how the act of writing this novel compared with that of your first one? In “Brotherless Night,” Sashi, the medicine-obsessed high schooler, becomes Sashi, the medical student. But her commitment to the ancient ideal of “first do no harm” is soon sorely tested. A young man for whom she has unrequited feelings asks her to help in a field hospital set up by the Tamil Tiger rebel group. She has misgivings about the Tigers, but says yes.

The author does a very good job of explaining the Sri Lankan civil war, which most people outside the region know little about, and I appreciated her historical rigor. I also appreciated the author's restraint. This book is filled with emotional moments, and I got to have those moments without the narrator telling me how to feel. As people lose family members and spouses, as they watch beloved people die by choice for the cause a lesser writer would have described their pain and sadness in great detail. But why? As a reader I don't want to read about feeling, I want to feel. The steadiness of the prose (which is not to say that it is cold or detached, just not overwrought) made me imagine and inhabit moments that I would have guessed were unimaginable. Empathy rather than schmaltz is a good thing. 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 In this novel, I was transported deep into the experiences of civilians who are inspired to action, either to defend their people or to serve all people. They witness first hand terrorism and suffering, all the horror of war. Friends turn on friends, student against teacher, siblings are divided, families displaced. SM: What’s your personal stake in the book? It comes through, the passion that you have, the feeling for the characters. How necessary was this book for you to write? I tend to read classics. Why? Because the probability is high that they are good. A classic must pass the test of time. I bet my bottom dollar that this book will one day become a classic. It’s that good! The book came out this year, at the start of 2023! It makes clear to me that excellent literature is being written today.Riveting, heartbreaking and extraordinary . . . Brotherless Night is a masterpiece.” — Minneapolis Star Tribune 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? With immense compassion and deep moral complexity, V. V. Ganeshananthan brings us an achingly moving portrait of individual and societal grief. " I want you to understand," the narrator of BROTHERLESS NIGHT insists, and by the end of this blazingly brilliant novel, we do: that in a world full of turmoil, human connections and shared stories can teach us how - and as importantly, why - to survive" CELESTE NG, bestselling author of LITTLE FIRES EVERYWHERE Ganeshananthan is a superb writer...I wept at many points in this novel and I also wept when it was over' Sunday Times

ETA: I need to add just a few words; I cannot stop thinking about what I have read, learned and experienced, as though firsthand. Atrocities were committed by all involved—the government, the terrorist groups, the Indian peacekeepers and the UN that failed to act. In shining a light on all sides, the book is balanced and fair. This is a book of historical fiction. It's about the Sri Lankan War. The war began in 1983. On May 18, 2009, President Mahinda Rajapaksa declared its end. Twenty-six years it took. Over one million were killed and millions of Sri Lankans, mainly minority Tamils, were displaced as refugees both inside the country and abroad. AM: I loved the main protagonist, the intelligent, brave Sashi, who tells the story of the Sri Lankan civil war from a first-person point of view. At the start, she is studying for her A levels at school and wants to become a doctor. Can you talk a little about your choice of this young female character for narrating this story? 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. Jaffna, 1981. Sixteen-year-old Sashi wants to become a doctor. But over the next decade, a vicious civil war tears through her home, and her dream spins off course as she sees her four beloved brothers and their friend K swept up in the mounting violence. Desperate to act, Sashi accepts K’s invitation to work as a medic at a field hospital for the militant Tamil Tigers, who, following years of state discrimination and violence, are fighting for a separate homeland for Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority. But after the Tigers murder one of her teachers and Indian peacekeepers arrive only to commit further atrocities, Sashi begins to question where she stands. 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.The daughter of Sri Lankan immigrants who left their collapsing country and married in America, Yalini finds herself caught between the traditions of her ancestors and the lure of her own modern world. But when she is summoned to Toronto to help care for her dying uncle, Kumaran, a former member of the militant Tamil Tigers, Yalini is forced to see that violence is not a relic of the Sri Lankan past, but very much a part of her Western present.