Brotherless Night

Winner of the 2024 Women's Prize for Fiction.

Jaffna, Sri Lanka, 1981. Sixteen-year-old Sashi dreams of becoming a doctor more than anything else in the world. Over the next decade, a brutal civil war destroys the girl's home, but certainly not her dream. Despair runs deep in Sashi when, at the beginning of fighting in the Sinhalese-dominated state, Sashi's older brother is killed, and her younger brothers join the Tamil Tigers, who, after years of discrimination and state violence, are fighting for a separate homeland for Sri Lanka's Tamil minority. Sashi accepts an invitation to work as a medic in a field hospital, helping wounded Tamil Tigers.

After the Tigers kill one of her teachers, Sashi begins to question her position. As the Tamil Tigers fight other separatist groups and become increasingly radicalized, Sasha’s loyalties are tested and she ponders what her role in the war should be. When she is invited to join a secret project documenting human rights abuses, she embarks on a dangerous journey that will change her forever.

This is a sobering, heartbreaking story about how the struggle for freedom of outsiders can become corrupt, and how a good cause can be twisted and turned against the very people she originally claimed to represent. At the same time, it is a portrait of the moral journey of a girl who, despite the war, did not betray herself and her values.

The author, a former vice president of the Association of South Asian Journalists and director of the American Institute for Sri Lanka Studies, not only describes historical events in detail, but also illuminates the internal conflict and political complexity.