Brotherless Night: 'Blazingly brilliant' CELESTE NG

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Fleeing to survive, Sashi agrees to work as a medic at a field hospital for one of the fighting military factions.

But over the next decade, as a vicious civil war subsumes Sri Lanka, her dream takes her on a different path as she watches those around her, including her four beloved brothers and their best friend, get swept up in violent political ideologies and their consequences. There is a civil war going on in Sri Lanka in 1981- and sixteen-year-old Sashi reveals what it means to be swept up in the violence and confusion. This is a beautiful, lyrical novel based on a sad and deadly chapter in history in Sir Lanka, South Asia.We slowly see how the conflict breaks families and creates families , it breaks ideals and creates new purpose.

This book was impossible to put down; the prose — or maybe it’s more accurate to say Sashi’s voice — had a momentum that just reached out and gripped me and never let go. She] forces the reader to discard a binary description of the world in favor of a more complex, human one. As a medical student she is recruited to help but discovers the leaders stooping to tactics no better than the enemies they are fighting.

Neither is there any sense in trying to find a final answer to the question: who started it- was it the Sinhalese or the Tamils. All of this is bookended by a prologue and last chapter set in New York as the narrator looks from afar at the brutal ending of the civil war. Despite the wrenching honesty of the novel, the strength of those who survive is powerful and somehow uplifting. But this book so beautifully and effectively personalizes the place, events, and people through the narrator's eyes that a reader feels the disintegration of society and relationships in a way that a history couldn't explain. The focus on Sashi and her family gives readers a connection to the many who struggled and suffered.