Brotherless Night

Winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2024

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Brotherless Night

Written by: V. V. Ganeshananthan

Narrated by: Nirmala Rajasingam

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WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2024

Sixteen-year-old Sashi wants to become a doctor. But over the next decade, as a vicious civil war tears through her hometown of Jaffna, her dream takes her on a different path as she sees those around her, including her four beloved brothers and their friend, get swept up in violent political ideologies and their consequences. Desperate to act, she must ask herself: is it possible for anyone to move through life without doing harm?

'A masterpiece of historical fiction' MONICA ALI, chair of judges for the Women's Prize for Fiction

'An unforgettable account of a country and a family coming undone… Brotherless Night is a spectacular work of historical fiction' Guardian

'A heartbreaking exploration of a family fractured by civil war' BRIT BENNETT, bestselling author of THE VANISHING HALF

'Blazingly brilliant' CELESTE NG, bestselling author of LITTLE FIRES EVERYWHERE

'Stunningly great' Curtis Sittenfeld, bestselling author of ROMANTIC COMEDY, via Twitter

'Ganeshananthan is a superb writer...I wept at many points in this novel and I also wept when it was over' Sunday Times

WINNER OF THE CAROL SHIELDS PRIZE FOR FICTION

©2023 V. V. Ganeshananthan (P)2023 Penguin Audio

V. V. GaneshananthanNirmala RajasingamPenguin

Genre Fiction

Historical

Literary Fiction

Political

Women's Fiction

World Literature

Genre Fiction Historical Literary Fiction Political Women's Fiction World Literature

Critic Reviews

Brotherless Night is a brilliant, compelling and deeply moving novel that bears witness to the intimate and epic-scale tragedies of the Sri Lankan civil war. In rich, evocative prose, Ganeshananthan creates a vivid sense of time and place and an indelible cast of characters. Her commitment to complexity and clear-eyed moral scrutiny combines with spellbinding storytelling to render Brotherless Night a masterpiece of historical fiction. (Monica Ali, chair of judges for the Women's Prize for Fiction)

V.V. Ganeshananthan's novel Brotherless Night reveals the moral nuances of violence, ever belied by black-and-white terminology

A beautiful, brilliant book... tender and fierce as it is mournful. It is unafraid to look directly at the worst of the violence and erasure we have perpetrated or allowed to happen, but is insistent that we can still choose to be better (Danielle Evans, author of The Office of Historical Corrections)

Riveting, heartbreaking and extraordinary for both its empathetic gaze and its clear-eyed depiction of the brutality of war, Brotherless Night is a masterpiece

Visceral, historical, emotional, it is 300 pages of must-read (Women's Prize judge Anna Whitehouse)

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 Novic, New York Times bestselling author of TRUE BIZ)

Prepare to have your heart well and truly pummelled by this searing story about a young Tamil woman growing up as the Sri Lankan civil war explodes around her . . . at times, it's hard to remember that this rich and nuanced novel isn't actually a memoir - so convincing is Sashi's voice and so compelling her story

A devastating look at the cost of war and choosing sides

Moving and rapturous... equal parts heartbreak and rage, unravelling the tragedy of Sri Lanka's civil war with a family saga of violence, loss, impossible choices and astounding courage (Shehan Karunatilaka, Booker Prize-winning author of The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida)

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.

Most relevant

Although based on the narrative of historical friction the story has the intimacy of a personal journal of the main protagonist Sashi and the story of her family, friends and mentors through the decades of the war for self distermination of the tamils but yet it brings the objectiveness of a journalist reporting on the trials and tribulations of ordinary civilians who were harrassed, looted, raped and killed by not only the Sri Lankan Army and the Tamil tigers but also Indian peace keeping force. The collateral damage of civilians, poignantly described, in the final stages of the war in 2009 was avoidable and something the United Nations could have perhaps prevented.