“Brotherless Night” : by V.V. Ganeshananthan

I am glad I read this book, which won the Womens Prize for Fiction 2024; a worthy winner having read at least two others on the shortlist. It was achieving this accolade which nudged my memory that I had made a mental note about it when it was first published.

The setting is Sri Lanka 1980-89 a time of civil war when the island is torn apart and the Tamil Tigers, amongst other militant groups, were fighting the Government forces.

The story is the life of Shashi, sixteen years old when the book opens and of her parents and four brothers and how the war tears their family apart.

This is a no holes barred fictional account of the brutality on all sides during that decade [and beyond]. The author though makes a readable entertaining book as we follow Shashi’s schooling. She is hoping to go to University to study medicine like her eldest brother. We see inside her family; her parents, father often away from home for long periods with his work, her mother the homemaker who seems to provide feasts for her family and the dishes at the family table are often detailed. This adds a homely domesticity to some of the scenes in comparison to the degradations they and the population suffer.

The author records that this novel was begun some 18 years before publication; the research evident from the detail contained makes this believable. The record of what happened in Sri Lanka is well reported however in a readable informative style, as fiction not fact. We follow what happens to Shashi and her brothers, their friend K, in particular and other friends, tutors and acquaintances.

Anyone who is old enough to remember when the Tamil Tigers were making the nightly news broadcasts will find that this book brings back forgotten memories of the sad situation in Sri Lanka which over the years has faded into history, but we can also recall the political unrest in more recent years.

It is not often one finds a book that is a “good read” that is also educationally stimulating, a refresher to one’s own memory. A lot happens within the pages of this novel which starts and finishes in 2009 as Sashi, a survivor, looks back on her life during her teens and twenties. A worthy winner of a prestigious literary award.