Edna O’Brien’s troubling nineteenth new novel, was written after she travelled to Nigeria in her 80s to speak to girls who had been kidnapped by the jihadist group Boko Haram. It depicts the trauma which some Nigerian schoolgirls faced when captured by the Extremist Book Haram militants. This heartbreaking account of this young girl’s abduction and journey to freedom is nothing short of brutal and Devastatingly beautiful

Girl is narrated by Maryam, a young Nigerian schoolgirl, who was abducted, abused and married off into the Book Haram group. Maryam whom we will follow through her abduction, experiences and its aftermath. During her time living as a prisoner in this extremely violent patriarchal camp, she’s given as a prize to a soldier, Mahmoud, whom she ended up being pregnant for and bears his baby. O’Brien brilliantly captured the fast-moving action: The first few pages take us from her abduction, rape, abuse and arranged marriage, down to her pregnancy, to Mahmoud returning from a battle with his leg half-blown off, getting a little glimpse into whatever life Mahmoud had before joining the group and to the point he shows her where he’s been stashing money made from war and telling her to take it just in case In an anger inducing sense of helplessness this Author instils in the reader.

O’Brien articulately captured the compelling story of how Maryam, her baby and another young girl Buki escapes the Islamic group during a chaotic fallout of an attack carried out by the Nigerian Army and set out to the forest in the hope of finding and being reunited with their families. During her time engulfed in the immense forest in the north-east Nigeria, Maryam witnesses horrors that no young girl should ever have to imagine. The vague memory of home slowly becomes a figment of her imagination, and the hopes of being reunited and accepted by her family may never become a reality.

As Maryam wanders, she becomes a kind of sounding board for other survivors and their stories, she navigates a helliscape of unthinkable atrocities in which fear of reprisals and consequences makes people unwilling to help. And When she is eventually reunited with her family, it felt like she has swapped one prison for another; she’s accused of having inflicted her suffering on herself and her baby is taken away and she is beaten.

O’Brien doesn’t spare our sensitivities – In the opening pages , a gang rape was featured, followed by a mass live burial and public shaming and stoning of women – but describes the horror with eerie calm. The delicate and tender manner in which the subject matter is captured and handled is the result of an extensive amount of research and understanding, which has taken O’Brien many trips and years of study to gain this level of authentic insight.

The focus of the narration is not only on the cruelty that the kidnapped girls have to endure, but also on the failure of their family and society to find a fitting or humane response to these experiences. Her shifting of reality and dream, as well as splicing of time creates such a lyrical and ultimately thoughtful depiction of the effects of the horrors these girls endured.

O'Brien uses a technique of seeming to describe an actual nightmare that unnoticeably developes into a lived experience to capture the horror of the story. This seemed like an unfamiliar and absolutely fitting literary device to me.

 Although this is a challenging novel in several senses, couple with concern of the choice of subject matter and question of cultural approbation and whether or not a story of this depth told by an outsider would be considered taking an ethnic minority's trauma and exploiting it for sensational effect: This is a thoroughly enjoyable book. The politically-sensitive topic was handled with care throughout and done so in a way that would have you believing you were reading the memoirs of this young girl. The theme of vulnerability shone through and the outcome was inspirational, if a tad idealistic. It is very well written and researched