Brotherless Night

Reviews

“Brotherless Night succeeds in telling all its stories—the historical and the personal, the factual and the ethical—as one, and that narrative has echoes. . . . This book, a careful, vivid exploration of what’s lost within a community when life and thought collapse toward binary conflict, rang softly for me as a novel for our own country in this odd time.”—The New Yorker

“Riveting, heartbreaking and extraordinary . . .  Brotherless Night is a masterpiece.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune
 
“Ganeshananthan is a writer of remarkable restraint.”—The New York Times Book Review

“A blazingly brilliant novel . . . With immense compassion and deep moral complexity, V. V. Ganeshananthan brings us an achingly moving portrait of a world full of turmoil, but one in which human connections and shared stories can teach us how—and as importantly, why—to survive.”—Celeste Ng, New York Times bestselling author of Little Fires Everywhere

“The best historical fiction novels don’t just tell a great story—they reveal a side of history that their readers may not be familiar with. V. V. Ganeshananthan’s Brotherless Night does just that. . . . [It] is a powerful work of fiction; one that reminds the reader what it means to live through war, and stand as a witness to history.”—Town & Country

“A heartbreaking exploration of a family fractured by civil war, this beautiful, nuanced novel follows a young doctor caught within conflicting ideologies as she tries to save lives. I couldn’t put this book down.”—Brit Bennett, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Vanishing Half

“Brotherless Night is my favorite kind of novel, one so rich and full of movement that it’s only later I realize how much I have learned. V. V. Ganeshananthan drew me in from the very first line, and the intricacies of her characters’ lives made it easy to stay.”—Sara Nović, New York Times bestselling author of True Biz

“A beautiful, brilliant book—it gives an accounting of the unimaginable losses suffered by a family and by a country, but it is as tender and fierce as it is mournful. It is unafraid to look directly at the worst of the violence and erasure we have perpetrated or allowed to happen, but is insistent that we can still choose to be better.”—Danielle Evans, author of The Office of Historical Corrections

“Searing and intimate.”—Publishers Weekly

“Through this moving story, Ganeshananthan traces the human aspects of war—the physical losses and tragedies as well as the conflicts of values that are often the true battlefields. . . . [She] forces the reader to discard a binary description of the world in favor of a more complex, human one.”—BookPage (starred review) Expand reviews