Yosha Gunasekera is a Sri Lankan-American attorney who represents people who have spent decades behind bars for crimes they did not commit. She teaches a course at Princeton University focused on wrongful conviction and exoneration. Gunasekera is a former Manhattan public defender and has written and spoken extensively on the criminal legal system. She lives in New York City with her husband.
Her debut mystery is The Midnight Taxi.
At Electric Lit Gunasekera tagged seven Sri Lankan novels haunted by skeletons in the nation’s closet. One title on the list:
Brotherless Night by V. V. GaneshananthanRead about another title on Gunasekera's list.
Brotherless Night unfolds amid the early years of the civil war between the Tamils and Sinhalese. Through the eyes of Sashi, a youngwoman who dreams of becoming a doctor, the novel traces how violence infiltrates domestic life and slowly dismantles a Tamil family weighed down by the decisions they make to uphold their way of life. Somehow, those very decisions are the things that unravel them all. We follow Sashi through her adolescence, her education, and her deepening political awareness as the war tightens its grip. The ghosts in this novel are many: missing brothers, dead classmates, and abandoned futures. As Sashi’s world shrinks under the weight of conflict, her lost possibilities haunt her as much as the dead. The final effect is devastating—a reminder of the enduring physical and mental trauma of war.
Brotherless Night is among Eliana Ramage's eight top books about ambitious women, Daphne Fama's seven novels set during times of great political upheaval and Asha Thanki's seven novels about families surviving political unrest.
--Marshal Zeringue
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