Seven novels about families surviving political unrest

Asha Thanki is an essayist and fiction writer. her work has appeared in The Southern Review, The Common, Catapult, Hyphen, and more. She is a Kundiman fellow and has received support through scholarships and grants from Sewanee Writers Conference, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Speculative Literature Foundation. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Minnesota.

A Thousand Times Before is Thanki's debut novel.

At Electric Lit she tagged seven books that demonstrate

the consequences of the world we live in, the ways that our political histories are inseparable from how we walk through the world. That the political and the personal are always, always, intertwined.

One title on the list:

Brotherless Night by V.V. Ganeshananthan

From the prologue of Brotherless Night and then all the way through, this novel puts forth an experience of conflict and history with the type of voice that makes you feel like the narrator is looking directly at you as she speaks. For Sashi, nearly 18 years old at the novel’s beginning, her four brothers and the neighbor boy, her parents and her grandmother—all fill her world with so much care, love, and joy. Their lane in Jaffna is a place of safety for so much of Sashi’s life, until the growing violence against Tamil people leads to the murder of her oldest brother, spurring both Sashi’s loved ones—and Sashi—to action.

Ganeshananthan writes in a way I can only dream of doing. Sashi’s voice engages the reader directly—indicts them. From the beginning, the novel asks, Who created the labels we use, and what happens when those labels serve to distance the observer so that empathy, humanity, and understanding are erased? And if it were you, what would you do, in order to protect the people you call home?

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue