After 12 days of abject theatricality, he died. His speeches were broadcast on some TV channels, and people from all over the Jaffna peninsula came to watch and to participate. In 1987, a Tamil Tiger had gone on a widely-publicised hunger strike at the Nallur Kandaswamy Temple in northern Sri Lanka. Ganeshananthan had been working on her first novel, Love Marriage (2008), about a Sri Lankan family fractured by the civil conflict, when she stumbled upon a significant piece of research. Discussing their motivation doesn’t justify it, it just tries to understand it and to think about how someone might have arrived at that point.” “The majority of people who have been referred to in that way are not unintelligible. “One of the things that the rhetoric of terrorism seeks to do is to make the terrorist unintelligible,” says the author over a Zoom call from Minneapolis, where she teaches creative writing at the University of Minnesota. And for that, she first dismantles the very language of terrorism. What Ganeshananthan, 43, American writer and journalist of Ilankai Tamil descent, seeks to do is bring obscured voices back into the conversation. Thousands of narratives clamour for precedence, and no single strand of politics, empathy or logic can do justice to them all. “I recently sent a letter to a terrorist I used to know.” In a way, the line speaks to the specific challenges of documenting the Sri Lankan civil war.

Either way, the opening line will disarm you. Maybe you’ve settled down in an armchair with a cup of tea, or maybe you’re leaning against a shelf in a bookstore, on the prowl for your next big read. Ganeshananthan’s sophomore novel, Brotherless Night, will give you pause.

Brotherless night book