Brotherless Night, a coming-of-age narrative set during the Sri Lankan civil war, grew out of research into a 1987 hunger strike in a temple, yielding material that didn't belong in Love Marriage but which the author couldn't forget.
Ganeshananthan's novel does for the Sri Lankan civil war what another Women's prize winner, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, did for the Biafran war in her 2006 novel, Half of a Yellow Sun: it tells the story of what it meant for ordinary people and reminds the world of a conflict many have chosen not to remember.
I grew up with stories of IPK [Indian Peace Keeping Force] violence and had not really seen that represented on the page. Many people have referred to Sri Lanka as India's Vietnam. As an American I feel that's a useful, hard analogy.
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