Brotherless Night
By V.V. Ganeshananthan
Penguin Random House
ISBN: 978-0812978278
384pp.

Sometimes a book is truly worthy of the award it receives. Brotherless Night by V.V. Ganeshananthan, which won the UK’s Women’s Prize for Fiction this year, is one such example. It is the story of a family and country — Sri Lanka — breaking down and, quite simply, it is unforgettable.

We begin in the early 1980s in Jaffna, the largely Tamil province where tensions with the majority Sinhalese are brewing. Sashi is the only sister to four brothers and wants to continue the family tradition of becoming a doctor, like her eldest brother and grandfather.

She is a studious girl, obedient daughter, and loyal friend but one particular friendship with K who, like her, dreams of becoming a doctor, will test her moral compass when he, along with two of her brothers, join the militant group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) or Tamil Tigers. But before that happens, the public library they all frequent is burned down. (This incident did take place in 1981 and is largely recognised as setting the stage for the civil war.)

Vellupillai Prabhakaran said he founded the LTTE in the late 1970s in response to violent and discriminatory anti-Tamil policies by the Sinhalese-dominated government. He murdered the mayor of Jaffna in 1975 in revenge, he said, for state violence during the Tamil conference a year earlier, where police shot many attendants.

Winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction, a Sri Lankan novel reads like a devastating and unputdownable memoir of a woman doctor navigating life during a brutal civil war

As the Tamil Tigers organised and........

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