Brotherless Night

"A few months ago I also spoke to the novelist Monica Ali about the books shortlisted for the 2024 Women’s Prize for Fiction , which this year was won by V. V. Ganeshananthan’s Brotherless Night . It’s set during Sri Lanka’s devastating civil war, and focuses on the female experience of conflict. “I mean, where to start?” asked Ali. “Once you’ve read this book, you’re never going to forget it. It’s absolutely searing, deeply moving. And it’s an utterly compelling piece of storytelling.”"

"I mean, where to start? Once you’ve read this book, you’re never going to forget it. It’s absolutely searing, deeply moving. And it’s an utterly compelling piece of storytelling. There have been quite a few novels recently that have looked at the Sri Lankan civil war. But this novel is unique in the way that it centres women’s experience of the war. She uses that lens of women’s experience to examine the impact on families, on the war of values that can tear families apart as much as the violence. And she’s unflinching in her commitment to complexity and nuanced and clear-eyed moral scrutiny of all sides of the conflict. It’s a novel that rewards multiple readings as well, because it’s packed with historical detail. It ranges in scale from the intimate to the epic. I mean, there’s range within the shortlist. In Anne Enright’s The Wren, The Wren , Phil is a huge presence in the book, who dominates the family dynamic. So it varies, doesn’t it? I don’t think we can put women’s writing in a box. Women, at times, centre women’s experience. Other times they might choose a different perspective."

"What makes a person become a terrorist? This book explores that question through the eyes of Sashi, a young Tamil woman growing up in a Sri Lanka on the edge of civil war. She wants to be a doctor but cannot ignore her loved ones who want to fight for a Tamil homeland. I was completely engrossed in this novel; reading it made the story of the Tamil Tigers and the bloody conflict in Sri Lanka real to me in a way they hadn’t been before."