V.V. Ganeshananthan Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Anthologies

V.V. Ganeshananthan is a published American author, essayist, and journalist. She is known for writing Love Marriage and her novel Brotherless Night. Love Marriage made the longlist for the Women’s Prize and The Washington Post named it one of the top books of the year.

She was born in 1980 and is of Ilankai Tamil descent. She has had her writing appear in different media publications such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and more.

The author attended Harvard College and graduated in 2002. While there, she was a managing editor of The Harvard Crimson. V.V. then graduated from the University of Iowa with her MFA in 2005. She received a master’s degree in 2007 from the Columbia University Graduate School of journalism. There she specialized in arts and culture journalism as a Bollinger Fellow.

V.V. has served as a vice president for the South Asian Journalists Association. She has been on the board for the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. She is a member of the board of directors for the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop and the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies.

She has been a Zell Visiting Professor of Creative Writing for the University of Michigan. V.V. is a teacher at the University of Minnesota for their MFA program. She is also the co-host of the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast, hosted on Literary Hub, which is all about where news and literature intersect.

Her book Love Marriage is set in North America and Sri Lanka. The book was first released for readers to enjoy in 2008 by Random House. It made the longlist for the Orange Prize, was a Discover Great New Writers Pick from Barnes & Noble, and was a Book World’s Best of 2008 from The Washington Post.

Her book Brotherless Night came out in 2023 from Penguin Random House. It was set in the Sri Lankan civil war in the early years of it unfolding. The book was received well and won the 2024 Carol Shields Prize for fiction, the 2024 Women’s Prize for fiction, and was a New York Times Editors’ Choice book.

Love Marriage is the first novel to come out from V.V. Ganeshananthan. The book first started while at Harvard as she started it as part of her senior thesis, advised by Jamaica Kincaid. The novel used vignettes to tell the story of how one family is affected by Sri Lankan politics and follows the main character of a young woman named Yalini who has Sri Lankan parents and is born on the same day as Black July, one of the most violent parts of the civil war in Sri Lanka.

In one Sri Lankan family, there are only two kinds of marriage that are spoken of. One of them is an arranged marriage, and the other is a love marriage. There are a lot of different types of marriages that exist, but to them they spend much of their time trying to get away from the arranged marriage and into one for love instead.

Yalini is a young woman with parents who are immigrants from Sri Lanka. When their country was seeming to be in a bad place showing no signs of stopping, they went to America and got married there. Yalini was born in New York and is growing up with traditions from the old country but also contending with the reality of the world that she currently lives in.

Then Yalini finds that her uncle is dying and she is called to go to Toronto so that she can help to care for him. Her uncle used to be part of the Tamil Tigers, a militant group. Through caring for Kumaran, Yalini finds out that violence is not just part of the past but even extends to the present.

As his family comes to say goodbye to him, Yalini starts to look into the roots of her family and what they have contended with as being ethnic Tamils. Now her uncle is dying and his daughter is facing an upcoming wedding that is politically motivated. She’s going to have to figure out what she stands for and what she wants to do in this fascinating examination of one family, their culture, and their journey to survive.

Brotherless Night is the second novel to come out from V.V. Ganeshananthan. The author worked on the book for nearly two decades before it was published at last. This is the story of Sashi, a sixteen year old who wants to become a doctor but finds that her ambitions may be interrupted by the Sri Lankan Civil War breaking out. She starts working at a field hospital for Tamil militants, eventually being convinced to join a medical school professor on a journey to document various human rights violations.

In this story, a young woman looks for courage as she tries to stay true to her intended path of becoming a doctor. This is difficult to do because Sri Lanka is being swept up in the middle of a civil war.

At sixteen years old, in 1981’s Jaffna, Sashi has always known that she has wanted to be a doctor. She never contended with the fact that a civil war could descend on the place that she calls her home. Sashi is forced to watch helplessly as her dream gets out of control and potentially derailed forever.

Her four brothers as well as friends are even affected by the violence that is going on and things are only getting worse. Sashi wants to help and takes the invitation of her friend K to work at the field hospital as a medic for the Tamil Tigers.

The militant group are determined to try and establish a homeland for the Tamil minority in the country after violence and being discriminated against by the state. That all changes when the Tigers kill one of Sashi’s teachers and then Indian peacekeepers come, but only make things worse.

Sashi may put herself in further danger when she has the chance to join up with a project that tracks and documents human rights violations. Doing so may end up having effects on her life that she never imagined.

This is the story of one person’s journey and how a civil war impacted her path. Read Brotherless Night to catch all of Ganeshananthan’s storytelling magic for yourself.