May’s Title Pick for Adults: Brotherless Night by V. V. Ganeshanathan

‘In this country of grief, the best kind of shelter is to be understood, to have someone stop next to me and, without asking anything, put their umbrella over us both, between us and the rain.’

We owe thanks to Annette MacKinnon, my wonderful Reader colleague, for bringing this powerful and deeply stirring book into our Reader orbit. Annette found out about Brotherless Night at her writing group and at the time was ‘looking for something different to get into and I liked the title!’ Annette soon found herself to be completely absorbed by the story, as we follow the courageous Sashikala, who is studying to become a doctor during the Sri Lankan Civil war of 1983 -2009.

Once settled on the subject of ‘home’ as our annual Bookshelf theme for 2026, Brotherless Night by V. V. Ganeshananthan immediately came to mind. The title of our bookshelf, ‘The Home We Carry’, is a reflection of our awareness that home means many things to different people and also that many people are sadly living across the world without a home, or with a home in ruins. In Brotherless Night, we see many forms of home, starting with a happy family home and then spiralling outwards to the seeking of other types of home, each carrying within them both the seeds of creation and destruction in this many sided story of love, politics and family.

In Brotherless Night we are asked to ‘Imagine the places you grew up, the places you studied, places that belonged to your people, burned.’ Sashikala Kulenthiren is just 16 years old when her once seemingly stable family home starts to fall apart amidst mounting political tensions. Once her eldest brother is tragically killed while witnessing an anti-Tamil riot, the family implodes as two of Sashikala’s remaining brothers, along with her first love K, join the Tamil Tigers as a response to their own tragic lose as well as from accumulating hurt from the ongoing violent persecution against the Sri Lankan Tamils by the Sinhalese-dominated government. In another world, Sashikala might well have married K and built a loving family home just like the one she had been born into; sadly that happy ending is never on the cards for this young generation. K remains the soul mate who was never quite allowed to be.

This is a big book physically and a big book emotionally. For all of the terror, it also finds places to show love and hope, and the enduring power of the human spirit. Even when the physical home is taken, the internal home of the spirit lives on – but it needs help to do this – and that help in Brotherless Night comes not only in the form of enduring friendships but also in our ability to see the world as human. For the political world and the personal world (whether we like it or not) do become inseparable for Sashikala and her family, as frightening words such as ‘terrorist’ and ‘war’ become stranger still when they come from your own world, from people you once loved, perhaps still do. This is a novel that asks us to turn towards such terror rather than look away from it, in the hope that we may find a way out together. So it is that we are asked to consider how:

‘We were civilians first. You must understand: that word, terrorist, is too simple for the history we have lived…How could one word be enough? We begin with this word. But I promise that you will come to see that it cannot contain everything that has happened. Someday the story will begin with the word civilian, the word home.’

I am already planning to re-read what I feel is a true modern day tour de force of survival, but also a demand for a more complex way of understanding the world, and I hope also a kinder one as we begin to understand how any person’s life might take the shape that it does.

by Clare Ellis, Head of Shared Reading Practice