Every couple of years VV Ganeshananthan would do a poll on Facebook asking people to nominate their saddest novel. The uncontested winner was Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance, about India during the turbulent 70s and 80s, a novel that Ganeshananthan loves. Now, with her second novel, Brotherless Night, which on Thursday night was awarded the Women’s prize for fiction, the American novelist has written a story to rival Mistry’s 1995 weepy.
We are talking in her UK publisher’s office, in a room with a view of the US embassy. “I have to apologise for my nation for so many things,” she says with a resigned eye roll. The author, who trained as a journalist, teaches fiction and nonfiction at the University of Minnesota and also co-hosts the Lit Hub Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast, which was set up in 2017 after the election of Donald Trump to shine a light on current events through literature. Her first novel, Love Marriage, about two Tamil families, was longlisted for the Women’s prize (then the Orange prize) in 2009.
Brotherless Night, a coming-of-age narrative set during the Sri Lankan civil war, grew out of research into a 1987 hunger strike in a temple yielding material that didn’t belong in Love Marriage but which the author couldn’t forget.
Ganeshananthan’s novel does for the Sri Lankan civil war what another Women’s prize winner, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, did for the Biafran war in her 2006 novel, Half of a Yellow Sun: it tells the story of what it meant for ordinary people and reminds the world of a conflict many have chosen not to remember.
“I grew up with stories of IPK [Indian Peace Keeping Force] violence and had not really seen that represented on the page,” she says. “Many people have referred to Sri Lanka as India’s Vietnam. As an American I feel that’s a useful, hard analogy.”
The long gap between Love Marriage and Brotherless Night, which Ganeshananthan began exactly 20 years ago, is partly because the author suffers from mobility issues that make it almost impossible for her to type. Since she was a child she has had various accidents and issues with her hands, which became particularly difficult when she was studying for her degree. She’s not quite sure how to think of it. “Is it an injury? Is it a disability?” she says.
The problem resurfaced during the pandemic when her hand swelled up horribly. The only way to finish Brotherless Night was to learn to use voice recognition software. “It’s useful, horrible, racist software,” she says of the glitches in voice recognition, though she adds that it is much improved since her student days in the late 90s. She says she has to “train it” if she wants it to pronounce her surname correctly (like “Jonathan”, with an extra n in the middle). She also has to let other people type her work. “There was a moment where I was like: how self-conscious am I? Not so self-conscious that I don’t want to write the book.”
In 1981, when Brotherless Night opens, Sashi, the clear-sighted narrator, is 16 and living in the Tamil-majority city of Jaffna with her parents and four brothers. She longs to become a doctor, but when the Sinhalese police burn down the library, her eldest brother is killed by the military and two others run away to join the movement; her comfortable middle-class world is changed for ever. The novel follows her over a bloody decade as violence ravages her country and family, as boy after boy disappears and whole communities are left “brotherless”.
“I met the first terrorist I knew when he was deciding to become one,” Sashi begins, and the word “terrorist” appears eight times in the opening two pages. Over the next 340 pages or so the novel asks what the word means, and how ordinary people find themselves to be terrorists. “That word, terrorist, is too simple for the history we have lived. Some day the story will begin with the word civilian, the word home,” Ganeshananthan writes.
“That page was written pretty close to 9/11 in comparison to the rest of the novel,” Ganeshananthan says. “I grew up in a community where that language was slung at us. Even now, I will sometimes meet someone who says: ‘Oh, you’re Sri Lankan. And you’re Tamil so you must be a Tiger.’ It’s not funny.” In the novel it is “very intentionally a provocation designed to make people think about why they use that language. Who is that language not used for? Who do you think that those people were before? You don’t negotiate with terrorists, you don’t talk to them. The story is over.” Brotherless Night is the beginning of the story.
As a child in Bethesda, Maryland, Ganeshananthan was raised on a mix of stories from her parents’ homeland alongside Anne of Green Gables and British children’s classics. Her parents had moved to America in the 1970s for professional reasons, but then, like many Sri Lankans, found themselves unable to return. Her father was a pulmonary paediatrician, her mother a Montessori nursery teacher. “I grew up in a world of people who cared about politics and talked about politics, even if my particular family did not,” she says. “Teachers and lawyers and World Bank people and embassy people.”
During the novel’s long gestation she was very conscious of being an outsider. “Like, how much homework could possibly be done?” she says. “A lot! A lot of homework. And I’m sure it’s not complete, or there are things that are missing from it. I was interested in proving that a person from the diaspora could show up.”
“I’m not telling the story of my country, but a story,” she stresses. “One of the things that the book is also attempting to do is decentre narrative authority a little bit: don’t read just one book about Sri Lanka, please consider two, three even,” she laughs. “Don’t be a person who reads one book.”
Two years ago the Sri Lankan novelist Shehan Karunatilaka won the Booker prize with The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. Though both novels are set during the same period and even include characters based on the same real-life figures, they couldn’t be more different. Where Karunatilaka dealt with the conflict in a fabulist exuberance, Ganeshananthan’s journalistic background led to a more faithful documentary approach. “I don’t know that people always perceive realism as a political statement. But in this case it is actually intended as one,” she says. “It’s insisting on the importance of fact. And it’s not assuming that the person who’s reading it has an awareness of the facts. And it’s also a little bit grumpy about that.”
While writing her novel, Ganeshananthan took refuge in reading comic novels, and even attended a course on comic fiction writing. She is flirting with the idea of writing a comic novel next, which seems a radical departure. “It’s also possible in a very contrarian way that I go and write something sadder.” Not possible, I say. “Have you read A Fine Balance?” she shoots back.
• Brotherless Night by VV Ganeshananthan is published by Penguin (£9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
