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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I've seen some comparisons of Girl A to Room but Girl A is much darker and less sentimental about family as Girl A dives deep into what it would be like to be an abused sibling from a house full of other abused siblings. I WAS A GIRL ONCE, but not anymore. I smell. Blood dried and crusted all over me, and my wrapper in sheds. My insides, a morass. Hurtled through this forest that I saw, that first awful night, when I and my friends were snatched from the school”. The story opens with Lex Gracie (Girl A) having been made executive of her mother’s will after her mother dies in prison. Lex and her siblings are infamous for unpleasant reasons: they were held captive in their home, abused and starved by their parents. Their father ended his own life when Lex escaped aged 15 and raised the alarm. Their mother ended up in prison. In The Literary Thriller 'Girl A,' Siblings Underestimate Their Childhood Ghosts". Bustle. 5 February 2021 . Retrieved 10 February 2021.

Lex is known as Girl A, the first child to escape her parents ‘House of Horrors’ and lead the police to discover her siblings, chained and starved. I spent much of the book wondering why Lex and her family had attracted so much attention, and I know it sounds terrible that I wanted more trauma than initially offered. There’s mention of the kids being chained up at some point but for much of their childhood it seemed they (just) lived with an incredibly strict delusional father and a subservient mother. Whilst O'Brien seems at first sight to be an unlikely author of a novel on this subject matter - being white, Irish, Octagenarian, with seemingly little or no knowledge or frame of reference in respect of Nigerian domestic conflict - 'Girl' does continue the I have this mean-minded habit of reading one extremely-hyped modern book per year – Normal People, Gone Girl, Eleanor Oliphant is Great Thank You – in the same spirit that a spider invites a big juicy fly into his home. Girl A is the 2021 victim. Let’s extract its fluids and watch it writhe. Lex is the second eldest sibling and a damaged and complex character. Determined not to let what happened to her stop her succeeding in life, yet unable to stop the psychological damage that come with an experience. She is strong and resilient and wonderfully written. Real-life inspirationOwen, James. "The best new thrillers for January 2021 — introducing a new hero, a bomb disposal expert". The Times. ISSN 0140-0460 . Retrieved 25 January 2021. On the night of April 14–15, 2014, 276 female students were kidnapped from a government school in the town of Chiboki, Nigeria by the Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram (and as of today, 112 of these stolen girls are still missing). Having seen an interview with one of the Chiboki schoolgirls who eventually got away from her captors, acclaimed Irish novelist Edna O'Brien travelled to Nigeria and spent many months interviewing other survivors of the kidnapping, NGO workers, government officials, doctors, and journalists. From this wealth of information, O'Brien wrote Girl: a fictionalised account of one Chiboki schoolgirl who is kidnapped, enslaved, brutalised, and after making a harrowing escape, finds herself further marginalised by her family and community. I suppose any of us could imagine what the first half of Maryam's story would look like (the beatings, forced labour, and repeated rapes), but by so deeply investigating the variety of Nigerian culture, O'Brien spins her story out in some ways that surprised and enlightened me. This isn't a long read but it includes a wealth of information, and while I can't say that I “enjoyed” this, it feels like a necessary act of witnessing; over a hundred of these girls are still out there. Lex Gracie doesn't want to think about her family. She doesn't want to think about growing up in her parents' House of Horrors. And she doesn't want to think about her identity as Girl A: the girl who escaped, the eldest sister who freed her older brother and four younger siblings. It's been easy enough to avoid her parents--her father never made it out of the House of Horrors he created, and her mother spent the rest of her life behind bars. But when her mother dies in prison and leaves Lex and her siblings the family home, she can't run from her past any longer. Together with her sister, Evie, Lex intends to turn the home into a force for good. But first she must come to terms with her siblings--and with the childhood they shared. It was the oft quoted, but brilliant opening lines of the novel: "I was a girl once, but not anymore" that sets the tone and immediately drew me in. The gradual, pained steps they make toward social integration — in the process severing some apron strings knotted suffocatingly tight by trauma — mark the subtle curve of the drama in this accomplished but unshowy debut feature from Onashile, a British-Nigerian playwright here lightly expanding on themes raised in her auspicious 2020 short “Expensive Shit.” Would that “Girl” were so head-turningly titled: It’s a misleadingly bland moniker for a film that asserts quiet confidence in its sociopolitical shading and the neon-bright impressionism of its aesthetic. At a narrative level, however, this slender 84-minute drama nonetheless sags a little, occasionally feeling like a short film concept filled out with vivid texture alone. That won’t hinder Onashile’s Sundance competition premiere from making its mark at further festivals, and with select indie distributors; a warm homecoming awaits when its opens next month’s Glasgow fest.

For me, I’m left wondering what the point was. I don’t know where the real crux of the story was – the past, or the present? What challenges were really overcome? It just felt like a long ramble in to nothingness and I was ultimately left quite disappointed. As many others seem to love it, I’m clearly just missing something.First, I don’t know about the ethics of this thing – you may remember Lullaby by Leila Slimani from 2016. This was a big hit novel closely based on a real crime in which a nanny stabbed to death the two children she was looking after. The real crime happened in 2012. Leila Slimani made a lot of dough fictionalising that crime. This is just one example. Se una nuova vita “normale” riescono a trovare, afferrare, quei ragazzi e quei bambini, che man mano si fanno adulti. Those children have to face their pasts to heal their wounds, having a proper future ahead of them. But of course it will be something more profound, compelling and challenging struggle they have been expecting. Whilst I enjoyed (in so much as one can, reading about such atrocities) this book, I feel a little uncomfortable about a white Irish woman having written it and to be the one to give voice to their ordeal. However, I assume Ms. O'Brien obtained the young women's permission before writing this book. Also, I hope the author intends to give at least part of the proceeds of this book to the survivors, as they struggle to build new lives for themselves and overcome the atrocities they endured. I cannot imagine going through the things they did and some still are, and no one should profit in any way from their pain. Because of omnipresent media access, news of the seizure of the Chibok schoolgirls by Boko Haram spread globally, and briefly occupied our collective consciousness. Girl is an important read for humanity; we are becoming so world-weary and disentranced. Hundreds of young girls and boys were taken, continue to be taken, for work slaves, sex slaves, for trading, and coercion into military. I applaud O'Brien for her research and what must have been a grueling period of putting this story to paper. As she notes, the story has not ended. Trauma works into your being and will forever be a heartless and opportunistic enemy, many of the girls are *branded* as "wives of the bush," seen as property still belonging to a threatening Boko Haram, the children are often unwelcomed and considered more as extensions of BH than babies, the percentage of girls that contracted AIDS is unreleased but speculated high.

I couldn’t entirely understand how the Gracie family was viewed with such horror. And in some ways it’s probably a lesson in extremism. How someone (‘Father’ in this instance) who’s very religious and rigid and in his beliefs—which he is in their younger years—can be influenced by others and those traits magnified to terrorise those around them. They don't. They can't.' She was trembling so badly she had to hold on to a pillar. She refuses a drink of water. This is as harrowing and haunting a book I have read since 2009 and Uwem Akpan's short story collection Say You're One of Them, set throughout sub-Saharan Africa. Edna O'Brien's Girl is the nominally fictional horror story of young girls enslaved by Boko Haram, the Islamic terrorist group that still holds sway in northeastern Nigeria.I’m 10 per cent terrified’ … Author and lawyer Abigail Dean, Dulwich Park, London Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian 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. Here we have the issue of place as well as time, and an early paragraph finishing like the one below (my emphasis) does not really serve to place the reader in 21st Century Nigeria: La vera casa degli orrori, quella a cui Abigail Dean si è ispirata, è in Muir Woods Road in California, che nel romanzo diventa Moor Woods Road in Inghilterra. Una normalissima anonima villetta in un normalissimo anonimo quartiere suburbano americano.