Thirty Girls - (Vintage Contemporaries) by Susan Minot (Paperback)

About the Book

"Esther is a Ugandan teenager abducted by the Lord's 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."--

Book Synopsis

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

A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW AND ECONOMIST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

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.

Review Quotes

"Wrenching . . . suspenseful . . . By far her best novel."--The New York Times

"Extraordinary . . . panoramic . . . poetic . . . Minot shows her readers that war zones cannot be contained within one country, or one region. When cruelty and violence reign, we are all at risk."--NPR

"A book about the relativity of pain; the grace of forgiveness; and the essential unknowability of a lover."--The Daily Beast

"A novel of quiet humanity and probing intelligence . . . Susan Minot takes huge questions and examines them with both a delicate touch and a cleareyed, unyielding scrutiny."--The New York Times Book Review

"Clear and searing . . . Pulls you in from the first page. . . . A book that looks hard at trauma, love, and humanity."--The Boston Globe

"Africa--described in Minot's muscular, evocative, and unflinching prose--offers itself up to Jane in all its beguiling beauty, its unremitting violence, and breaks her open like an egg."--MORE Magazine

"Visually intense . . . Minot's writing is so potent and the story told so tragic, the novel sears the mind."--New York Daily News

"Daring . . . Minot's cleanly sculpted prose and capacity to penetrate and open the mind and heart challenge us to step outside our comfort zone. Finally, there comes this realization: Esther and Jane aren't so different at all. We recognize their stories as ours. . . . Minot succeeds, through her fictionalized version, in making us care as much as she does."--O, The Oprah Magazine

"A haunting portrayal of two women."--Vanity Fair

"When there is a story the world needs to know, does it matter who tells it, or just that it gets told? . . . Minot tells both stories with such harsh, lyrical beauty that neither is easy to forget. Grade: A-."--Entertainment Weekly

"Hotly anticipated. . . . Wins the reader's heart."--Vogue

"Exquisitely poignant and painfully credible . . . [A] heart-rending story, with [an] honest and bleak view of the power of love to heal so much human breakage."--Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Exceptional . . . A fragile but unmistakable note of hope."--Elle

"Gripping . . . sensual . . . immediate . . . Minot wants to do more than sound a drumbeat of atrocities. . . . She wants to use literature to transmute a human horror into something that can be understood and in time healed."--The Miami Herald

"Excellent, evocative . . . Thirty Girls sketches the landscape with impressionist strokes and then burrows in to view the cruelties people can visit on one other and themselves."--The Seattle Times

"Thirty Girls conveys an important story that people need to hear. . . . Esther is a stunning character whose strength and bravery is an inspiration to readers."--Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"A novel as raw, beautiful, and seemingly serendipitous as the politics, landscape, and culture of the sub-Saharan Africa it describes."--Shelf Awareness

About the Author

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.