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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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. Louise and David Turpin, californiani: nel 2019 sono stati processati e condannati al carcere a vita per aver abusato di 12 su 13 dei loro figli. La foto è presa dalla loro pagina Facebook. Fantastic, I loved it." - Paula Hawkins, New York Times bestselling author of The Girl on the Train

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.” I kneaded the knots out of my shoulders, pulled air deep beyond my intercostal muscles to prevent the hypoventilation I felt coming on, then looked up at nothing and thought, "This is what it was like doing an intake interview." It has been several years. Sitting 1:1, conducting an intake interview --veteran and novice alike -- is lying under a steamroller and trying to keep your bulk of flesh and bones from flattening into velum that floats away in a breeze and leaves a stain of blood, tears, and soul.O’Brien only obliquely examines the reason for that failure. Her aim is to tell the stories of the girls themselves, stories she gathered by extensive on the ground research and interviews before taking the literary decision to combine what she had heard and “give the imaginative voicings of the many through one particular girl”. When her mother dies in prison and leaves Lex and her siblings the family home, she can’t run from her past any longer.

Partendo da un caso di cronaca - quello indicato da alcune foto che si vedono qui – mischiandolo ad altri più o meno simili, ambientando in Inghilterra invece che negli Stati Uniti, Abigail Dean racconta la storia di una famiglia che definire disfunzionale è eufemistico: abuso, violenza, privazione, carcerazione… Content warning: Rape, stoning, involuntary pregnancy, horrifying birthing scene, humiliation and pretty much everything you can imagine.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”. 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: CHOSEN AS A BEST BOOK OF 2021 BY THE TIMES, THE FT, THE GUARDIAN, THE INDEPENDENT, STYLIST AND MORE! Why didn’t anyone want her to go to the wedding? I still don’t understand that. They were ok with her staying with Ethan, visiting Delilah and Gabriel. Why not go to the wedding?

Edna O'Briens Roman "Das Mädchen" ist eine extrem berührende und erschütternde Geschichte, die auf wahren Begebenheiten beruht. Die Autorin erzählt die Geschichte der Schülerinnen, die in Nigeria von der islamistischen Terrorgruppierung Boko Haram verschleppt, gefoltert und vergewaltigt wurden sowie die Zeit nach der Flucht aus den Lagern der Terroristen. Sie beschreibt in kurzen und prägnanten Sätzen ohne etwas zu beschönigen das Martyrium, das die jungen Frauen durchleben mussten und das selbst nach der Gefangenschaft noch in einer Stigmatisierung endet - aber auch die riesige Stärke, die sie bewiesen haben. Vor allem auch sprachlich konnte mich der Roman sehr begeistern. Die Gedanken und Erlebnisse der Protagonistin werden durch den Schreibstil noch intensiver für die*den Leser*in. 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. A novel that's psychologically astute and written with flair. In the traditional new year battle between much touted first thrillers it's the clear winner." - Sunday Times (UK)Ma il mistero rimane: perché mai debuttare con una storia così orribile e raccapricciante, inquietante e disturbante? From those cases and a few others,” says Dean, “I saw the power of teenage girls to escape and be incredibly strong. That was something I wanted to think about in terms of Lex, her resilience and intelligence in the face of a devastating experience.” But Dean ultimately wanted the book to be “about hope rather than, ‘Will they or will they not get out of the house?’ So you have the reassurance at the start that Lex is OK, then it’s a case of the years that follow – what then? Once the headlines have been recycled, what happens to the people who have been at the heart of these things? How do you live in the aftermath of that?” Girl A,” she said. “The girl who escaped. If anybody was going to make it, it was going to be you.”The book opens with the story, fifteen years in the past, of how then-15-year-old Lex Gracie dramatically escaped from her home—later dubbed the House of Horrors—where she and her siblings were kept in literal chains by their parents. In the present, Lex’s mother has just passed away in prison, and left the family home to the children. Determined to turn their old house into something positive, a Community Center, Lex must reach out to each of her surviving siblings. The story is told from the perspective of Girl A, Lex Gracie, and follows the now grown-up Gracie siblings as they navigate adulthood after a childhood filled with horror, abuse and starvation. Many of the scenes from their childhood are disturbing, though I would say I didn't find it to be gratuitous in the way books like I Know Who You Are and My Absolute Darling were. Now we have Girl A. There are a few “House of Horrors” crimes where insane parents abuse their numerous children for years, but in 2018 there was the case of David and Louise Turpin which happened in California. 13 children were all kept in the house for their whole lives, some chained up, many actually starving when discovered. Police were only informed when a 17 year old girl escaped through a window.

Perché ho trovato qualcosa di incongruo e stonato in questo libro di sole centonovanta pagine, neppure fitte, che mi sono trascinato per un tempo sterminato rispetto al mio consueto ritmo di lettura.Si prende tre mesi off e inizia la scrittura. La prosegue e porta a termine cambiando impiego: ora è nel team legale di Google e dice che lavora meno di prima, ha le sere e i weekend liberi (faccio fatica a crederlo). I think it's very easy to assume that when a sibling group in an abusive situation is rescued, the result will be siblings who tried to protect each other and thought as a unit and will be bonded forever to protect each other. It's a nice way to conclude something terrible and makes us feel better about how awful family can be.