Brotherless Night (2023) by V. V. Ganeshananthan

 Audiobook

Brotherless Night (2023)

by  V. V. Ganeshananthan

Read by  Nirmala Rajasingam

   Brotherless Night is another great book coming out of the post-Tamil War Tamil diaspora. There's been a small flood of Sri Lankan authored books hitting the international market, typically by making it onto the Booker Longlist.  I heard about Brotherless Night after it won the 2024 Women's Prize for Fiction-  I couldn't resist a prize winner about the Tamil War in Sri Lanka, which I think will prove to be one of the key current events from that period in world history- it lasted 26 years from 1983 to 2009, and Ganeshananthan's narrator and protagonist, Sashikala Kulenthiren is there to take us through it from the perspective of a young woman from a well-off Tamil family (one daughter, four brothers) who is destined to become a doctor.  

  There is nothing magical realist, post-modern or metafictional about Ganeshananthan's approach- which is so straight forward it often reads like a biography memoir vs. a novel.  Sashi is a bright, engaged young woman living in a momentous time, but hers is the only perspective we get from the book.  There's no secondary plot or skipping around in time- the reader gets Sashi's experience, having her normal life disrupted, losing all but her youngest brother to the liberation movement and then witnessing the horrors o the tamil's themselves, who were as ruthless to their own internal rivals and dissidents as the Sri Lankan government, the Indian Peacekeepers, who end up sowing more misery with their ill-considered troop deployment and of course the Sri Lankan government, which really seems befuddled more than anything else by a rebellion in a part of the country that was so thoroughly comprised of this one, rebellious ethnic group that middle ground became impossible to find.

  Ganeshananthan moonlights as a field medic at a Tamil jungle hospital and witnesses all manner of catastrophe before getting involved in an effort to document the atrocities committed on all sides.  This puts her in a rough spot with the Tamils, but her service as a field medic and sister of 3 Tiger brothers earns her a ticket to the United States, from where she witnesses the end of the war.   It is QUITE a journey- 100x more vital than ANY American author.  She's not particularly accomplished as a prose stylist but the story is so powerful it doesn't matter.

 It was also a fantastic audiobook because of the accents involved- all of which would be impossible for me to do in my head.  Fully recommend the Audiobook edition- 20 hours long.