V. V. Ganeshananthan presents Brotherless Night with Curtis Sittenfeld

A courageous young woman tries to protect her dream of becoming a doctor as civil war devastates Sri Lanka in this searing novel. Jaffna, 1981. Sixteen-year-old Sashi wants to become a doctor. But over the next decade, as a vicious civil war subsumes Sri Lanka, her dream takes a different path as she watches those around her, including her four beloved brothers, get swept up in violent political ideologies and their consequences. She must ask herself: Is it possible for anyone to move through life without doing harm? Sashi begins working as a medic at a field hospital for the militant Tamil Tigers, who, following years of state discrimination and violence, are fighting for a separate homeland for Sri Lanka's Tamil minority. But after the Tigers M**der one of her teachers and the arrival of Indian peacekeepers brings further atrocities, she turns to another one of her professors, a feminist and dissident who invites Sashi to join her in a dangerous, secret project of documenting human rights violations as a mode of civil resistance.

Set during the early years of Sri Lanka's thirty-year civil war, and based on sixteen years of research, Brotherless Night is a heartrending portrait of one woman's moral journey and a testament to both the enduring impact of war and the bonds of home

V. V. Ganeshananthan is the author of Love Marriage, which was longlisted for the Women's Prize and named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post. Her work has appeared in Granta, The New York Times, and Best American Nonrequired Reading, among others. A former vice president of the South Asian Journalists Association, she has also served on the board of the Asian American Writers' Workshop. She is a member of the board of directors of the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies and the Minnesota Pr*son Writing Workshop. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Minnesota and co-hosts the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast on Literary Hub, which is about the intersection of literature and the news.

Curtis Sittenfeld is the New York Times bestselling author of six novels including Rodham, Eligible, Prep, American Wife, and Sisterland, as well as the collection You Think It, I'll Say It. Her novels have been translated into thirty languages. In addition, her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Washington Post Magazine, Esquire, and The Best American Short Stories, for which she has also been the guest editor. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Time, and Vanity Fair, and on public radio's This American Life. Her seventh novel Romantic Comedy will be published in April.

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