Girl

CATHERINE TAYLOR, FINANCIAL TIMES (UK)

"...[a]compact and fearsome new novel ... O'Brien's prose is as unwaveringly assured as ever...yet its customary operatic style is toned down. We are left with the bare, ghastly details of human endurance ... The depravity of certain scenes and the commodiousness with which they are rendered have aspects of the retelling of myth ... Yet we are jolted into the necessary reminder that this is the present day ... Maryam's account (conveyed in a hidden notebook) of her ordeal is both succinctly detached...and wildly hallucinatory ... In this impeccably written and indelible novel, [O'Brien] brings her juristic yet merciful eye to an ever-wider expression of the deep injustices of female and human circumstance."

FRANCESCA WADE, THE NEW STATESMAN

"... O'Brien tests fiction's capacity to probe, through language, empathy and imagination, what reportage cannot ... In other hands, using fiction to tell the story of other people's unimaginable pain would be exploitative. But O'Brien is one of the few writers who can make the case for fiction's power in such circumstances ... The violence in the camp is charted in intense yet not gratuitous detail ... O'Brien's descriptions of landscape are particularly rich...But she is at her most compelling when she voices Maryam's interiority ... The cumulative power is immense."