Thirty Girls

A literary tour de force set in war-torn Africa. from the best-selling, award-winning author of Evening. The Lords Resistance Army, led by warlord Joseph Kony, has terrorised northern Uganda for years, mutilating and murdering people as they raid villages, kidnapping and raping children to expand Konys family. This is the fate in store for Esther. She is one of 139 students abducted from St Marys School. When their headmistress tracks them down she must accept a dreadful bargain; most of the girls will be released, only if thirty remain with the rebels. Esther is one of the thirty. And eventually she will have to learn to live with all she has seen and done to survive. Jane is an American writer, observing the glamour of Kenyan ex-pat life while she waits for transport to the border. She has come to write about whats happening to Ugandas children. But her fragile emotional state will be sorely tried by her experiences. In unflinching prose, Minot gives us razor-sharp portraits of two women struggling to wrest meaning from events that test them both in unimaginable ways. Intense and stunningly evocative, Thirty Girls is Minots most ambitious novel yet.