V. V. Ganeshananthan’s novel Brotherless Night won the 2024 Women’s Prize for Fiction. The prize announced the result on 13 June 2024. Set in Jaffna during the early years of Sri Lanka’s civil war, the novel follows a teenager whose hopes of becoming a doctor are reshaped by violence engulfing her family and community.
What is Brotherless Night about?
The story centers on Sashi, a 16-year-old Tamil girl in Jaffna who wants to become a doctor. As the war deepens, her four brothers and their friend are drawn into political violence, and Sashi learns to practice medicine amid the conflict. The Women’s Prize describes the narrative as spanning the first decade of the war in Sashi’s life; the Carol Shields Prize’s expanded plot description says she later becomes involved in documenting human-rights violations.
The novel’s focus is both intimate and historical: it follows one family as violence changes their choices and relationships. It is fiction, not a comprehensive history of Sri Lanka or the war.
How the novel relates to history
The Women’s Prize Trust reading guide says the novel draws on 16 years of research into the Sri Lankan civil war. That figure is the guide’s description of the book’s background, not an independently audited measure. The guide also asks readers to consider what fiction can—and cannot—convey about a violent historical period.
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For a fuller understanding of Sri Lanka’s history, readers should treat the novel as one perspective and consult additional historical accounts. The Guardian’s contemporaneous interview coverage of the award carries the headline “Don’t read just one book about Sri Lanka”; that is the publication’s headline, not a verified quotation from the author.
What the judges said
Monica Ali, chair of the 2024 fiction judges, called Brotherless Night “a brilliant, compelling and deeply moving novel that bears witness to the intimate and epic-scale tragedies of the Sri Lankan civil war.” Her statement also praised the novel’s sense of time and place, complex moral scrutiny and storytelling. This is the jury’s assessment of the winning work.
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Brotherless Night: A Novel is listed by Google Books with Random House Publishing Group metadata as a 384-page fiction book dated 30 January 2024. That listing describes one edition; format, territorial publication and current availability can vary.
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