Tamil community, located at the northern tip of Sri Lanka.  The narrator, Shashikala (Sashi), is 16 and is living in Jaffna with loving parents and four brothers.  She aspires to be a doctor like her eldest brother, Niranjan, whom she idolizes, her late grandfather who was a renowned physician in Colombo, and her brilliant, charismatic neighbor K whom Sashi hero worships and has a crush on.  The burning of the local library signals the start of the civil war, which wreaks havoc in Sashi’s idyllic life.  Her beloved family is torn apart.  Niranjan is killed in the violence.  Two of her brothers, Dayalan and Seelan, join the Tamil Tigers, as does K.  Sashi’s younger brother, Aran, decides not to join the Tigers and stays at home. As events unfold around her, Sashi is forced to make difficult choices about her life, politics and activism.  She is an eyewitness to the plight of the civilians, especially women, who are caught between the battling Sinhala government, the Tamil tigers, the Indian peace-keeping forces and the United Nations which failed to act in a timely manner.

The content is harrowing, but the writing and the plot kept me spell-bound as I devoured every word of this novel with fleshed-out characters. This historical novel also highlights the strength and courage of women in pain and adversity within a culture that undermines women.  The narrator is a female, and women are at the center of the story.

Ganeshananthan lives in Minneapolis and teaches at the University of Minnesota. Brotherless Night is available in the Coffman Library.

vs 10 percent), a change from the past two years when women made up 80 percent of all checkouts.

Our reading habits stayed steady. Fiction made up 40 percent of all loans, and mystery/thriller followed closely with 37 percent. Biography and memoir were 6 percent, and history was 4 percent. Poetry and nature/science were each 2 percent.

Our most borrowed book was Louise Penny’s 2025 title, Grey Wolf. Among non-mystery fiction, our top choices were Orbital by Samantha Harvey and James by Percival Everett.

Our most borrowed author was Minnesotan William Kent Krueger, with thirteen of his books checked out a total of thirty-six times. Krueger, who has twenty-five titles on our shelves, has been our most popular author for four of the last five years, coming in second only in 2021 when Louise Penny won the honor. Krueger is one of several mystery/ thriller authors whose back lists are very popular at Coffman. Among them are Donna Leon (13 books checked out), Louise Penny (7), and Mick Herron (7). Most popular non-mystery fiction authors are Louise Erdrich (7) and Ann Patchett (5).

Not all readers were looking for today’s best sellers. Brontë, Wharton, Austen, Cather, Twain, and Fitzgerald were all read. Classic mystery writers also made their appearances: March, Christie, Sayers, James, and Per Wahlöö and Maj Sjöwall.

Our nonfiction reading ranged from the very popular The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer to Doris Kearns Goodwin’s An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s, to Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux.

​If you are a regular at our library, keep reading. If you aren’t, stop by, browse, pick up a title from a favorite author or a new-to-you author, and settle in. Maybe if, along with those individual acts of advocacy we chose to engage in, we all just spend a little more time sitting and reading books, we can help make the world a better place.