Reviews with content warning for Suicide - Brotherless Night

Brotherless Night is a fantastic piece of historical fiction showcasing the impact of the Sri Lankan civil war on one young woman and her family. The book opens with 16 year old Sashi living at home with her parents and four brothers. Her oldest brother is studying to become a doctor and Sashi hopes to follow in his footsteps. Over the next decade we see the toll the conflict takes. One brother is killed in anti-Tamil violence and two others join the Tamil Tigers. The war pauses Sachi’s studies but she does eventually get to study medicine and ends up volunteering at a hospital controlled by the Tigers, treating both cadres and civilians. The book did a great job highlighting the complexities of the conflict and the atrocities committed by the Sri Lankan armed forces, the Tamil Tigers (including against their own people) and the Indian peacekeeping forces. It also showed the way the conflict divided families. Sashi also becomes involved in efforts to accurately document the events of the war. The importance of this and the efforts made to verify the accuracy of all accounts was something I can’t recall seeing previously in the books I’ve read. I loved Sashi as a character, particularly the way she was constantly wrestling with her conscience, trying to ensure that the actions she took or didn’t take were right for her - not always an easy feat when she was surrounded by some very passionate and persuasive people. Definitely a book I’d recommend.

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directorpurry's review against another edition

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emotional reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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hannahbailey's review against another edition

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challenging dark reflective sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

This was an intense and evocative look into the Sri Lankan civil war from the perspective of one woman, whose life and family were torn apart by it.

The narrative takes a journalistic approach to storytelling, to the point that I felt I was reading a factual eye-witness account of the horrors of the past. Despite the first-person POV, the narrative is pointedly lacking in human emotion and reaction. The recounting of events is direct, so no facts or details are hidden or sugarcoated to protect the reader. This makes for a heavy read as things go from bad to worse, with little reprieve. These aren’t criticisms — in fact, I felt it was a deliberate and powerful choice to convey the story in this way. The narrator experiences unspeakable losses within her own family and witnesses many more atrocities of war. The only way she can tell the truth — which is her aim from the beginning — is to remove much of the heightened emotion she must be feeling.

There is less dialogue than I would expect to find in a novel, but the nature of the plot allows for it. I’m not sure this narrative style is necessarily for me, but it’s refreshing to read something different. I learned a lot about Sri Lanka’s recent history and politics which I found really interesting. The novel spans about 30 years, but follows the narrator and the decisions made by those around her, rather than taking a wider lens to the world at the time. It was particularly poignant then when the author brings in the United Nations towards the end of the novel — after so much ‘avoidable’ conflict and death, the UN’s ambivalence towards civilians’ lives was the final nail in the coffin of what was a horrific and drawn-out war. I was shocked to discover the conflict was still going on in 2009. An informative read if your history education was as white-washed and colonised as mine.

If you enjoyed this, you may enjoy Moth by Melody Razak for similar tone of voice and the depiction of war through one family's experience.

Thank you to NetGalley for the free e-arc in exchange for an honest review

TW: war, death, murder, child death, rape, violence, sexual violence, fire, blood/gore, injury detail, kidnapping, torture, genocide, grief, suicide, animal

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hilaryreadsbooks's review

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5.0

Set during Sri Lanka’s civil war, V.V. Ganeshananthan’s BROTHERLESS NIGHT follows a young woman, Sashi, as she seeks to protect both her dreams of becoming a doctor and the lives of her loved ones in the wake of escalating violence and discrimination. As war rages around them, Sashi struggles to survive amidst death, fear, and endless brotherless nights, as she begins to lose the boys she loves the most. These boys—dead, or gone to join the Tamil Tigers and other militant groups fighting for a Tamil homeland, their changing values turning their leaving into another kind of loss, and a moral crisis for Sashi as she determines how she wants to resist, fight, and show her power. At the same time, she is clear that her condemnation of violence is a complicated thing, as all things are in impossible situations. “You must understand: that word, terrorist, is too simple for the history we have lived…” she says. “Whose stories will you believe? For how long will you listen?”

BROTHERLESS NIGHT is an invitation to question the narratives we are told, to restructure the course of history we have mapped out in our minds. It is a powerful tribute to the resistance and bravery of women. Most of all, it is an account of terrible things that happened to many people. As Sashi grieves, she says: “I wanted the four clean walls of my Jaffna childhood, the courtyard with its cup of sunlight, the small and dear lane where I had grown up. Give me a house that hasn’t burned, I thought: an upright home full of people who consider me precious.” I ached for her throughout this book, for the lost lives and futures and would-have-beens, for the ways that hate can make others forget that life should be treated as precious.

Sashi’s resilence and courage are miraculous; and yet I wished for another impossible miracle: to rewind the course of history, to un-burn libraries and markets and homes, to un-do death and starvation, to put the light back in young eyes, to erase blood from hands that were never meant to kill. Listening is a powerful thing, in that it is also a reminder that we cannot change the past, but amplify its stories and work to a changed future.

[Thanks to the publisher for a review copy. This is out now]

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deedireads's review

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challenging dark sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

All my reviews live at https://deedispeaking.com/reads/.

TL;DR REVIEW:

Brotherless Night is a beautiful and heartbreaking and powerful novel about one girl’s coming-of-age during the Sri Lankan civil war. I absolutely loved it.

For you if: You like books with especially strong first-person narrators.

FULL REVIEW:

Random House sent me an early review copy of Brotherless Night (although it’s out now!), and its incredible blurbs (Celest Ng, Brit Bennett) convinced me to bump it to the top of my list. And holy moly, am I glad I did. This one could easily make my list of favorites for 2023.

The prologue starts with an arresting opening line: “I recently sent a letter to a terrorist I used to know.” And that paragraph ends just as powerfully: “I met a lot of these sorts of people when I was younger because I used to be what you would call a terrorist myself.” So begins our time with Sashi, who is older and living in the US now, but telling us her story as it started in 1981 in Jaffna, when she was a teenager and the Sri Lankan civil war was just beginning. She dreams of becoming a doctor, to help people as her grandfather did. And she does — but along the way, anti-Tamil violence costs her family dearly, in more ways than just lives: two of her brothers join the Tamil Tigers, as does a close family friend. Eventually, Sashi herself finds herself drawn into the conflict herself, in ways that I don’t want to spoil but found deeply resonant.

This book was impossible to put down; the prose — or maybe it’s more accurate to say Sashi’s voice — had a momentum that just reached out and gripped me and never let go. But it wasn’t just excellent on a sentence level. This book is tough to read at times, but gorgeous and heartbreaking and powerful throughout. There are no good guys in war, and it’s easy to condemn actions from the outside, but who knows what each of us would do to keep our families safe? Humans are flawed and beautiful and never black and white, and neither are our choices. No matter what, there is strength in those who fight and those who survive.

Get yourself a copy of this one and read it, please.

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