Brotherless Night is an unforgettable coming-of-age novel, an awakening from tribal loyalties into new-found identity and agency. It is set in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, during the civil war between Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese ethnic majority and the country’s Tamil minority. Between 1983 and 2009, this bitter conflict resulted in the deaths of around 100,000 people and displaced approximately 800,000 more.
The protagonist, Sashikala Kulenthiren, a young Tamil woman, is a teenager when the novel begins, walking apace with her brothers towards glittering university degrees. Theirs is a home filled with books, conversation, gardening. But her world changes when government atrocities and the call of militancy start disappearing boy after boy from the peninsula.
Two of Sashi’s brothers join the Tamil Tigers rebel army after their other sibling is killed in anti-Tamil riots. Sashi is seized by grief for her fallen and embattled brothers as they are swept up in bloody conflicts. Gradually, she finds strength in a women’s collective which agitates, organises for themselves and treats hypermasculinity, instead of serving it.
