Der brennende Garten (Brotherless Night)

Der brennende Garten tells of the civil war in Sri Lanka in the 1980s, spanning the years until the war’s end in 2009. The young Tamil Sashi becomes a doctor, while two of her brothers and her friend K join the Tamil Tigers. The novel follows Sashi, her family and friends over several years marked by political upheavals and violence. The prose style is captivating, sticking close to the characters and exploring the scope for action in the ideological times of war. V. V. Ganeshananthan spent eighteen years writing the book. At the end of this long path stands a novel that does justice to historical complexity while also being gripping and moving. Sophie Zeitz’s rendering into German is so nimble that one forgets one is reading a translation.
—Paula Fürstenberg

V. V. Ganeshananthan (born 1980 in Hartford), is an associate professor of English at the University of Minnesota. Her novel Brotherless Night was praised by critics and won the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Carol Shields Prize in 2024. She co-hosts the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast on Literary Hub, which is about the intersection of literature and the news.

Sophie Zeitz (born 1972 in Frankfurt am Main) studied American studies, Romance studies, and philosophy in Heidelberg, Granada and Munich. She lives as a freelance translator in Berlin, including books by John Green, Leslie Jamison, Douglas Stuart and Tess Gunty.