This idyllic world of youthful aspirations supported by a loving family is presented from the beginning as precarious. Her brother Dayalan and his friend, K, are closer to her in age, and together they frequent the Jaffna Public Library as a place for intensive study. Sashi idolizes her eldest brother, Niranjan, finishing medical school, and wants to emulate him in her choice of profession. Ganeshananthan’s Brotherless Night unique is that it presents this traumatic history from the perspective of women and the myriad ways in which their lives are transformed by institutions of ethnic nationalism.īrotherless Night begins with a prologue set in New York in 2009 but then moves back to Jaffna in northern Sri Lanka in the early 1980s, where the narrator, Sashi, is preparing for her entrance exams to medical school in a Tamil upper-middle-class family in which she is the only sister to four brothers. This traumatic history has been the backdrop of recent Sri Lankan novels in English. THE SRI LANKAN Civil War, which began with demands of the ethnic Tamil minority to form their separate homeland in the early 1980s after waves of state-sanctioned violence initiated by the Sinhala majority, stretched over three decades, leading to horrific civilian casualties and eventual defeat of the militant Tamil Tigers at the hands of the Sri Lankan army.
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