8 Books by Minnesota Authors We're Excited for in 2023
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Loading... - Turner Booth
- 23 Feb 2023
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Read more, read local.
The post-holiday deadheart of winter has passed, but the early sunset reading season isn’t over yet! From a memoir mashup to climate anxiety poems to a major publishing house blockbuster, these Minnesota authors will keep readers in words through all of 2023’s false springs and icy sidewalk treachery.
V. V. Ganeshananthan’s literary career includes an impressive list of accolades. She’s the author of the acclaimed 2008 novel Love Marriage, an Associate Professor in the University of Minnesota’s Creative Writing Program, co-host of the fiction/non/fiction podcast, and the occasional star of her friend and fellow author Curtis Sittenfeld’s Twitter posts. Earlier this year, Sittenfeld shared a side-by-side photo spread celebrating Ganeshananthan’s new novel and showing, not telling, that good books take time. In the first photo, from 2020, Ganeshananthan holds up an unwieldy book draft and, in the second photo, from 2023, she displays a glossy hardcover.
Brotherless Night follows Sashi, a young woman who aspires to study medicine, and her four brothers who join the Tamil Tigers’ fight for independence. Set in Sri Lanka in the 1980s, the action takes place at the beginning of a decades-long civil war. Brotherless Night is a hearty meal on its own, just packed with satisfying, literary nutrients and flavors. A recent episode of fiction/non/fiction, in which Sittenfeld interviews Ganeshananthan about her decades-long process of drafting and rewriting the novel, works as a fun companion condiment. (January 3, 2023, Penguin Random House, 368 pages.)
Ganeshananthan on Brotherless Night:
“I grew up on stories about northern Sri Lanka and specifically the city of Jaffna in the 1980s. Those stories, plus the well-timed gift of a nonfiction book called The Broken Palmyra, helped me to begin the story and to find the compelling voice of my protagonist and narrator, Sashi, an aspiring medical student growing up at the very beginning of the Sri Lankan civil war. I want readers to get a glimpse of what it might be like to be a minority civilian in a militarized society. Some of my readers will already know this, and I hope those readers see their experiences and especially the feeling of this kind of life represented accurately on the page. To me, the most exciting thing about Brotherless Night is that it’s about the power and importance of the lives of ordinary people. I also hear that it’s a page-turner!” Read More…
