Women’s prize for fiction winner tells story of a family caught up in conflict in her second novel, Brotherless Night

Every couple of years VV Ganeshananthan would do a poll on Facebook asking people to nominate their saddest novel. The uncontested winner was Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance, about India during the turbulent 70s and 80s, a novel that Ganeshananthan loves. Now, with her second novel, Brotherless Night, which on Thursday night was awarded the Women’s prize for fiction, the American novelist has written a story to rival Mistry’s 1995 weepy.

We are talking in her UK publisher’s office, in a room with a view of the US embassy. “I have to apologise for my nation for so many things,” she says with a resigned eye roll. The author, who trained as a journalist, teaches fiction and nonfiction at the University of Minnesota and also co-hosts the Lit Hub Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast, which was set up in 2017 after the election of Donald Trump to shine a light on current events through literature. Her first novel, Love Marriage, about two Tamil families, was longlisted for the Women’s prize (then the Orange prize) in 2009.