Great Read Series

College of DuPage Great Read Series is built on the belief that learning is not limited to the walls of the College. Rather, the College seeks to extend ourselves to offer more active learning opportunities for students outside of the classroom and provide further access to our resources to the community. The Great Read Series is designed with the goal of providing students the chance to see themselves within literature, highlighting contemporary voices, and encouraging everyone to learn from and listen to a new perspective.

How the Great Read Series Works

Each year, the College will select one book students, faculty, and the community can read together:

• A calendar of engaging events will be designed around the book where all audiences can participate. The events will encourage reading for all ages and generate discussions between COD and the community on important topics through literature. All events are free and accessible. 
• Select classes across the college will be linked to the program to approach the text through different lenses. This can occur in two ways: through direct inclusion of the text or through connection to a thematic focus inspired by the text. Free copies will be provided to the COD students enrolled in these linked courses, as well as to local libraries and our own COD library.
• Programming will culminate with the author visiting COD.

Current Programming

The 2026-2027 Great Read Series selection is Brotherless Night by V. V. Ganeshananthan. 

This year's thematic focus is Connecting and Getting Involved. Topics for consideration will include: 

• The responsibilities of citizenship
• How individuals or groups in different disciplines approach getting involved in their communities
• Questions of belonging and the obligations membership in a group brings

About the Book

Jaffna, 1981. Sixteen-year-old Sashi wants to become a doctor. But over the next decade, a vicious civil war tears through her home, and her dream spins off course as she sees her four beloved brothers and their friend K swept up in the mounting violence. Desperate to act, Sashi accepts K's invitation to work as a medic at a field hospital for the militant Tamil Tigers, who, following years of state discrimination and violence, are fighting for a separate homeland for Sri Lanka's Tamil minority. But after the Tigers murder one of her teachers and Indian peacekeepers arrive only to commit further atrocities, Sashi begins to question where she stands. When one of her medical school professors, a Tamil feminist and dissident, invites her to join a secret project documenting human rights violations, she embarks on a dangerous path that will change her forever. 

Set during the early years of Sri Lanka's three-decade civil war, Brotherless Night is a heartrending portrait of one woman's moral journey and a testament to both the enduring impact of war and the bonds of home.

 

 

About the Author

V. V. Ganeshananthan (she/her) is the author of the novels Brotherless Night (winner of the 2024 Women’s Prize for Fiction, the 2024 Carol Shields Prize, the 2023 Asian Prize, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and an NPR Book of the Year) and Love Marriage (longlisted for the Women’s Prize and named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post). Her work has appeared in Granta, The New York Times, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, among other publications. She writes fiction engaging Sri Lankan politics, histories, and diasporas, particularly those connected to Tamil and other minority communities. She also writes media criticism, reported essays, and book reviews. As a disabled writer, she engages questions of access and equity in all of her work, and also uses adaptive technologies and strategies to write.

A former vice president of the South Asian Journalists Association, she has also served on the board of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and is presently a member of the boards of the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies and the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. The National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, Yaddo, MacDowell, and the American Academy in Berlin have awarded her fellowships. She has been visiting faculty at the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan and at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and now teaches in the MFA program at the University of Minnesota, where she is a McKnight Presidential Fellow and professor of English. She co-hosts the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast on Literary Hub, which is about the intersection of literature and the news. She grew up in Bethesda, Maryland and now lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota with her family and dogs.