Every now and then, I get wind of a brilliant book through a whisper network of friends and colleagues and it becomes precious intel that cuts through the hundreds of publishers’ overblown press releases (“a searing, urgent masterpiece”) that land in my inbox each week. So it was a year ago, when a friend said she had been blown away by Brotherless Night, a novel set in the early years of Sri Lanka’s three-decade civil war, by an American novelist of Sri Lankan Tamil descent, VV Ganeshananthan. I had never heard of Ganeshananthan and even though her first novel, Love Marriage, had been longlisted for the Orange prize in 2008, it turns out hardly anyone in this country had heard of her either.
