This won both the Women's Prize for fiction and the Carol Shields' Prize, and I can very much see why. It primarily deals with the early years of the civil war in Sri Lanka, and a Tamil family torn apart as some join the resistance movement, while others want to stay out of the fighting. The book takes the form of main character trying to reconstruct the story decades later, retelling her childhood through her years as a medical student in an effort to de-mythologise them.

The writing is incredibly powerful, and very beautiful, and Ganeshananthan clearly expresses the feeling of having no good choices, while everyone around you makes worse choices. I appreciated how she engaged with the conversations around international movement solidarity, and the sexism embedded in it, but didn't let the book feel like a history lesson. The focus on the narrator's journey and choices is always at the heart of it all. Towards the end, it references events covered in more detail in Sharon Bala's The Boat People, which takes place in the same conflict a generation later, so I felt a lot of resonance there.

I feel like there's a lot more to be said about this book, but I'm running out of review steam. It's good!