Brotherless Night begins in Jaffna, in the Tamil-dominated north of Sri Lanka, in the early 1980s.  Sixteen-year-old Sashi is studying hard, dreaming of going to medical school with her brothers and friend K.  Her life is slowly torn apart with the onset of the Sri Lankan Civil War. While staying with her Grandmother in Colombo in 1983, she finds herself caught up anti-Tamil riots. Her eldest brother is killed and her grandmother’s house burnt down. Subsequently two of her brothers join the Tamil Tigers, and her fourth brother briefly detained by authorities before departing for England.

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is structurally a murder mystery, albeit one with significant twist.  In 1989, war photographer Maali Almeida finds himself in a highly bureaucratic version of the afterlife, in a kind of hinterland between life and passage to “The Light” in which he must solve the mystery of his own death in ‘seven moons’ (otherwise known as a week). It’s set against the backdrop of a particularly turbulent period is Sri Lanka’s troubled recent history, in which various factions including the Tamil Tigers, the marxist JVP, and the government’s own death squads are unleashing relatively indiscrimate violence on each other at a shocking rate.