Minot, who made her name when she debuted in 1986 with Monkeys, which won the Prix Femina Etranger, generally uses her delicate, affectingly wrought fiction to unpack the complications of love. Here she does something different, taking us to Uganda to meet Esther, a teenager kidnapped by the Lord's Resistance Army and compelled both to witness and to commit atrocities. She also introduces us to Jane, an American journalist traveling through Uganda to report on the fate of girls like Esther and to escape a cascading series of failed relationships, and the stories of Esther and Jane create a resonant counterpoint throughout. Minot's first big work since 1997's Evening.
The long-awaited novel from the best-selling, award-winning author of Evening is a literary tour de force set in war-torn Africa.
Esther is a Ugandan teenager abducted by the Lords Resistance Army and forced to witness and commit unspeakable atrocities, who is struggling to survive, to escape, and to find a way to live with what she has seen and done. Jane is an American journalist who has traveled to Africa, hoping to give a voice to children like Esther and to find her center after a series of failed relationships. In unflinching prose, Minot interweaves their stories, giving us razor-sharp portraits of two extraordinary young women confronting displacement, heartbreak, and the struggle to wrest meaning from events that test them both in unimaginable ways.
With mesmerizing emotional intensity and stunning evocations of Africas beauty and its horror, Minot gives us her most brilliant and ambitious novel yet.