SM: This is a very complicated political stew. How do you take all of this and turn it into literature? How do you deal with politics like this and have characters who are political without turning didactic, which your novel clearly is not? How do you pull that off ? Everyone was going in the other direction, Niranjan told me later. I was trying to swim against a tide. 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. I couldn't put this book down' BRIT BENNETT, bestselling author of THE VANISHING HALF Perhaps Ganeshananthan’s finest achievement in Brotherless Night is showing, with meticulous accuracy, what it feels like to inhabit a day-to-day life onto which someone else, from the privilege of great distance, can throw a word like 'terrorism,' and be done." — New York Times So it’s been going on for about twenty-five years by most people’s count. But it’s important to realize that like any war, it’s the result of things that happened for decades before. The Sri Lankan government started discriminating against Tamils very shortly after the country gained independence from the British in the late 1940s. This has been well documented. The riots of 1958, for example. The war is really a culmination of previous events. It doesn’t justify the Tigers’ violence, but it does provide appropriate context.

V. V. Ganeshananthan: It took me a long time to understand anything about the origins of the conflict. I think that when you’re a kid and your parents tell you a certain set of stories, and parts of those stories are true and maybe also parts of those stories are colored by their perspectives a little–which isn’t to say what my parents told me wasn’t true–but it wasn’t exactly the only truth there was. So one of the things I did when I was researching the book was to read a whole bunch of books about Sri Lanka and to try and figure out exactly what historians thought was the defining truth.Brotherless Night is an absolute must-read and a story that I will not be forgetting any time soon. V.V. Ganeshananthan did a masterful job not only crafting this story and setting but also with her characterization. I highly recommend Brotherless Night to all! Innovative….this is an ambitious family drama about an underreported part of the world, filled with well-shaded characters [and] gorgeous flourish…Buy it."— New York Magazine

VG: I think it’s easy to pay attention to people who are engaged in combat, and those are frequently men. In the case of the Tigers, there was also a women’s wing, and there has been some attention paid to that. That makes sense, but I think the brunt of the war was really faced by civilian women who were displaced, who were resisting militarization. I’ve seen its impact, and writing about the impact of militarization on civil life was very important to me. It seemed like a logical way to do that, in a way that would mean a lot to me, would be to write about it through experiences of women whose homes and families were ruptured by the militarization of the state, the militarization of Tamil militants, the militarization of so-called Indian peacekeepers, who were also responsible for committing some atrocities during that time. I also felt it had not really been written about, at least not very much in the lens of fiction.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.

My father nodded. “Be careful,” he said, his voice low. He held Niranjan’s arm and then released him. 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.SP: I loved it, and I did think it was interesting that it could serve both functions, depending on who’s reading it. From the author of Love Marriage, the deeply researched novel Brotherless Night took nearly two decades to complete as V.V. Ganeshananthan meticulously crafted characters and events after real activists who left records of the lives normal people lived amidst Sri Lanka’s civil war. I drew on so many different books. Another way to talk about it would be to talk about nonfiction. There’s a book by a guy named Gordon Weiss called The Cage, which has a really good amount of history in it and is written for lay readers. And then my friend Rohini Mohan wrote an astonishing nonfiction book called The Seasons of Trouble that is totally brilliant. There’s now so many excellent books that it’s impossible to have an exhaustive list.

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. V. V. Ganeshananthan drew me in from the very first line, and the intricacies of her characters’ lives made it easy to stay.” —Sara Nović, New York Times bestselling author of True Biz Ganeshananthan will launch the book with a conversation with Curtis Sittenfeld at the Magers & Quinn bookstore in Minneapolis on Thursday, Jan. 26. 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? She is a past vice president of the South Asian Journalists Association and now serves on the board of the Asian American Writers' Workshop, as well as on the graduate board of The Harvard Crimson. a careful, vivid exploration of what's lost within a community when life and thought collapse toward binary conflict [...] a novel for our own country in this odd time. New YorkerHere there is no righteous way to fight a pure fight for justice. Sashi loses her brothers and friends to the Tamil Tigers, the revolutionary group rising up in response to the oppression forced upon them by the Sinhalese majority. As a medical student she is recruited to help but discovers the leaders stooping to tactics no better than the enemies they are fighting.