Thirty Girls

The lives of two young women fighting for salvation in the face of ruinous brutality and loss intertwine in this "extraordinary [and] poetic" (NPR) novel from the award-winning author of Evening.

"A haunting portrayal."--Vanity Fair

"Clear and searing."--The Boston Globe

Esther is a precocious Ugandan teenager who is abducted from her Catholic boarding school by Joseph Kony's rebels and, along with twenty-nine of her classmates, forced to witness and commit unspeakable atrocities in the Lord's Resistance Army.

Jane is a sensual, idealistic American writer often waylaid by romantic pleasure who has come to Africa hoping to regain her center after a devastating marriage. Absorbed into a group of glamorous, nomadic expatriates in a landscape of singular beauty and intensity, Jane is reawakened. But she is on a journalistic mission as well, hoping to give voice to the thirty abducted girls she first heard about back in America.

In unflinching prose, Susan Minot interweaves the stories of these two astonishing young women who, as they confront displacement and heartbreak, are hurtled inexorably closer to one another.

Susan Minot is an award-winning novelist, short-story writer, poet, and screenwriter. Her first novel, Monkeys, was published in a dozen countries and won the Prix Femina Étranger in France. Her novel Evening was a worldwide bestseller and became a major motion picture. She lives with her daughter in New York City and on an island off the coast of Maine.