A literary tour de force set in war-torn Africa. from the best-selling, award-winning author of 'Evening'. The Lord's Resistance Army, led by warlord Joseph Kony, has terrorised northern Uganda for years, mutilating and murdering people as they raid villages, kidnapping and raping children to expand Kony's 'family'. This is the fate in store for Esther. She is one of 139 students abducted from St Mary's School. When their headmistress tracks them down she must accept a dreadful bargain; most of the girls will be released, only if thirty remain with the rebels. Esther is one of the thirty. And eventually she will have to learn to live with all she has seen and done to survive. Jane is an American writer, observing the glamour of Kenyan ex-pat life while she waits for transport to the border. She has come to write about what's happening to Uganda's children. But her fragile emotional state will be sorely tried by her experiences. In unflinching prose, Minot gives us razor-sharp portraits of two women struggling to wrest meaning from events that test them both in unimaginable ways. Intense and stunningly evocative, 'Thirty Girls' is Minot's most ambitious novel yet.

'The bedspread was sloughing off the foot of the bed, the white sheets were as flat as paper. This is not what she'd pictured when she asked him over for lunch today. It really wasn't.'

Taking one single interlude ? two bodies entwined on a bed at midday, lovers rekindling an old affair ? Susan Minot's new novel chronicles a relationship from the alternating perspectives of a man and a women.

Thoughts cascade through Benjamin's mind, memories of the chest thumping moment when he first met Kay; of the night they shared under the mosquito net on the pink bed in Oaxaca; and of his fiancé, Vanessa, and the simple choices that face him. Memories unspool in Kay's mind too. She recalls the dangerous lure of Benjamin, the man who drove her scepticism away; the dread and the thrill of the first night they spent together; and now she asks herself, how has she let him slip back into her life like this?

Graphic, provocative and reminiscent of Hanif Kureishi ?Intimacy?, Susan Minot's new novel dissects a love affair in breathtaking detail.

The long-awaited novel from the best-selling, award-winning author of Evening is a literary tour de force set in war-torn Africa.
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.
With mesmerizing emotional intensity and stunning evocations of Africa's beauty and its horror, Minot gives us her most brilliant and ambitious novel yet.

A "NEW YORK TIMES" BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
July 1954. An island off the coast of Maine. Ann Grant--a 25-year-old New York career girl--is a bridesmaid at her best friend's lavish wedding. Also present is a man named Harris Arden, whom Ann has never met . . .
After three marriages and five children, Ann Lord lies in an upstairs bedroom of a house in Cambridge, Massachusetts. What comes to her, eclipsing a stream of doctor's visits and friends stopping by and grown children overheard whispering from the next room, is a rush of memories from a weekend 40 years ago in Maine, when she fell in love with a passion that even now throws a shadow onto the rest of her life. In "Evening," Susan Minot gives us a novel of spellbinding power on the nature of memory and love.

The setting is a New York apartment where two long-estranged lovers try to resuscitate their passion. Kay is old enough to be skeptical about men–this man in particular–but still alert to the possibility of true love. Benjamin is a filmmaker with an appealing waywardness and a conveniently disappearing fiancée. As the two lie entwined in bed, Susan Minot ushers readers across an entire landscape of memory and sensation to reveal the infinite nuances of sex: its power to exalt and deceive, to connect two separate selves or make them fully aware of their solitude. Honest and unflinching, the result is a hypnotic reading experience.