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.