Girl A: The Sunday Times and New York Times global best seller, an astonishing new crime thriller debut novel from the biggest literary fiction voice of 2021

Product Information

The book is told in a fragmentary fashion – sometimes explicit, at others more oblique. Reality is mixed both with dreams and nightmares; at times Maryam deliberately tries to distance her mind from what is being done to her body, at others sheer physical immediacy dominates; at one stage (ironically well after her escape) Maryam almost breaks down (when her daughter is taken from her) and the text undergoes a similar breakdown. I found the technique very powerful.

I do not get on with books that set out to teach me something - while I love the power literature has to broaden my horizon and to let me see lives outside my own, paedagogical books irk me. If I want to learn something, I gravitate towards non fiction - and as a piece of non fiction this might have actually worked for me because then the story told would have been just that: authentically mirroring the reality. As it stands, I questioned a lot of authorial decisions O'Brien made here (why is everybody so uniquely awful? Do we really need to only see awfulness?). Each section of the book places more emphasis on each of the children, 7 in total. There were a few things kept behind until revealed later on they mention 7 children but only name 6, I knew that what had happened to the 7th would come out eventually. Also I had an idea that Evie was no longer alive which was confirmed later on. On the night of April 14–15, 2014, 276 female students were kidnapped from a government school in the town of Chiboki, Nigeria by the Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram (and as of today, 112 of these stolen girls are still missing). Having seen an interview with one of the Chiboki schoolgirls who eventually got away from her captors, acclaimed Irish novelist Edna O'Brien travelled to Nigeria and spent many months interviewing other survivors of the kidnapping, NGO workers, government officials, doctors, and journalists. From this wealth of information, O'Brien wrote Girl: a fictionalised account of one Chiboki schoolgirl who is kidnapped, enslaved, brutalised, and after making a harrowing escape, finds herself further marginalised by her family and community. I suppose any of us could imagine what the first half of Maryam's story would look like (the beatings, forced labour, and repeated rapes), but by so deeply investigating the variety of Nigerian culture, O'Brien spins her story out in some ways that surprised and enlightened me. This isn't a long read but it includes a wealth of information, and while I can't say that I “enjoyed” this, it feels like a necessary act of witnessing; over a hundred of these girls are still out there. The story opens with Lex Gracie (Girl A) having been made executive of her mother’s will after her mother dies in prison. Lex and her siblings are infamous for unpleasant reasons: they were held captive in their home, abused and starved by their parents. Their father ended his own life when Lex escaped aged 15 and raised the alarm. Their mother ended up in prison.If there is a criticism which I think is valid it is around the language. In her LA Review of Books review of “Little Red Chairs”, Claire Wills said the language seemed very dated and that “O’Brien appears to believe that interiority is timeless, that the emotional inner world, the sensations of consciousness, remain the same even while the world changes around them. But the difficulty is that even if we accept that such desires may be primordial (which is debatable), the language in which desire is expressed, and arguably in which it is felt, is surely not.” And there's the rub. Are siblings who grow up together with each fighting to survive, really all going to be close? Sibling dynamics are never sunshine and roses in any family and throw in the abuse in Girl A, in which children are subjected to horrific psychological and physical abuse, and the relationships get very murky indeed.

Being familiar with the case, I was immediately interested in this book's blurb when it came up on Book of the Month.A tour de force, beautifully written, richly imagined, and compulsively readable. Add to this its grave sometimes ominous tone, and the result is unforgettable." - Booklist (Starred Review) Whilst O'Brien seems at first sight to be an unlikely author of a novel on this subject matter - being white, Irish, Octagenarian, with seemingly little or no knowledge or frame of reference in respect of Nigerian domestic conflict - 'Girl' does continue the