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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

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Dean is 32 now and working on her second novel, but continues in her role at Google. These days, she’s enjoying the law. “I didn’t think about stopping, to be honest. Working with contracts and words all day is, for me, complementary to writing. Legal work forces you to think about every word in every sentence, and how they might be interpreted, which is helpful.” I think there are good intentions in the attempt and it did remind me of their plight, I googled what the current situation is (unsurprisingly, it's not good and I still feel helpless to do anything). I agree with a lot of what Wendy Darling wrote in her review. I didn’t necessarily need more grim descriptions, but with all the jumping between timelines there wasn’t a clear narrative as to when things started getting worse in the house and why. I’d have liked a cleaner line to follow, though i can understand why it was written this way.

This had me gripped from the start, you can’t help but be drawn in with this beautifully written story about survival against all odds.

Girl A is an unflinching look at the long term effects of child abuse and it's an intense and well-written novel. Being familiar with the case, I was immediately interested in this book's blurb when it came up on Book of the Month.

Is Girl A an easy read? No. But it's the rawest and most unflinching look at being an abuse survivor I've read in a long time as well as a honest and scathing examination of all the ways we, as a society, turn away from what we don't want to see, that instead of doing something or even just asking someone if they need help, we pretend away. (The whole "he/she/they were totally normal...well, except for X, Y, and/or Z" that always comes out when the neighbors of a horror are interviewed) Dean is “90% incredibly excited, 10% terrified” about seeing her story out in the world. “You spend so long with these characters,” she says. “It’s like a small obsession. I almost think about them all the time. It’s incredible that these people, who have been so real to me for years, will become real to other people. I’ve loved and detested numerous characters in my lifetime of reading. The idea that people will have equivalent feelings about my characters is just wonderful.” 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. Maryam is the girl taken to Sambisa through whose eyes the ordeal experienced by the abducted girls is articulated by the author. Maryam is the girl who speaks for all abductees. The traumatic theme of Girl A is not the easiest to read about but the way Abigail Dean tells this story is wildly compelling. It is a dive into the deprived depths of human nature and the consequences for the people who are victims in that. I was totally immersed in this story and I know it will stay with me for a long time.

Girl A

Former President of Ireland Mary Robinson cited Edna O'Brien (born in 21930) as "one of the great creative writers of her generation". Irish novelist Colum McCann avers that O'Brien has been "the advance scout for the Irish imagination" for over fifty years. Since 1960 she has written nineteen books. Together with her sister, Evie, Lex intends to turn the House of Horrors into a force for good. But first she must come to terms with her six siblings – and with the childhood they shared. Beautifully written and incredibly powerful, Girl A is a story of redemption, of horror, and of love. review by Prerna brought up the problems of this kind of writing generally). Though I haven’t read O’Brien’s Irish writing, I know that it is generally possessed of a great rage against the treatment of women, and this fits in well with that theme despite the different setting. Even as they arrived, these cousins and neighbours, I felt a freak. I could read their minds, by their false smiles and their false gush. I could feel their hesitation and worse, their contempt. I knew they were thinking, Jihadi wife, with the Sambisa filth still clinging to her.

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