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. *Starred Review* Rebels in the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda burst into a convent dormitory, seize 139 schoolgirls, and march them off into the night. Sister Giulia follows and bravely argues for their release. She returns with 109. The outlaws keep 30, including smart, courageous Esther. Jane, an American writer and youngish widow, visits a friend in Kenya, sexy, generous Lana, and takes up with Harry, who is passionate about paragliding—a poetic and apt embodiment of the illusion of freedom: though you feel exhilarated in flight, you are at the mercy of forces beyond your control. Jane is on her way to Uganda to speak with young women at a camp for traumatized children who escaped their enslavement to the psychotic rebels. Lana, Harry, a wealthy American businessman, and a French documentarian decide, cavalierly, to accompany her. In her first novel in more than a decade, spellbinding Minot (Rapture, 2002; Evening, 1998), a writer of exquisite perception and nuance, contrasts Esther’s and Jane’s radically different, yet profoundly transforming journeys in a perfectly choreographed, slow-motion, devastatingly revealing collision of realities. So sure yet light is Minot’s touch in this master work, so piercing yet respectful her insights into suffering and strength, that she dramatizes horrific truths, obdurate mysteries, and painful recognition with both bone-deep understanding and breathtaking beauty. --Donna Seaman "Wrenching . . . Suspenseful . . . By far her best."             — The New York Times “A novel of quiet humanity and probing intelligence . . . Minot is particularly good on the topology of desire . . . But it’s the story of what happened to those 30 abducted girls that shows Minot’s gifts as a writer . . . Minot takes huge questions and examines them with both a delicate touch and a cleareyed, unyielding scrutiny.”             — The New York Times Book Review   “Clear and searing . . . Pulls you in from the first page . . . The details are rendered with empathy, and both main characters occupied honorably in their struggles. It forces the reader to consider how much luck fashions the basic architecture of our lives. And how, despite all the vast differences in that architecture, what we strive for is remarkably the same . . . A book that looks hard at trauma, love, and humanity, that contemplates the wide potential spectrum of life, concluding perhaps that life is not competition between us, but instead a struggle within each of us for whatever ‘twigs’ of love and happiness we can manage, no matter what the context.”             — The Boston Globe “Extraordinary . . . Panoramic . . . Poetic . . . Minot shows her readers that war zones cannot be contained within one country, or one region. When cruelty and violence reign, we are all at risk.”             —NPR    “Daring . . . Minot’s cleanly sculpted prose and capacity to penetrate and open the mind and heart challenge us to step outside our comfort zone. Finally, there comes this realization: Esther and Jane aren’t so different at all. We recognize their stories as ours . . . Minot succeeds, through her fictionalized version, in making us care as much as she does.”             — O Magazine “Africa—described in Minot’s muscular, evocative, and unflinching prose—offers itself up to Jane in all its beguiling beauty, its unremitting violence, and breaks her open like an egg. When she meets Esther Akello, whose time in captivity has left her silent and self-hating, the two recognize in each other something that needs healing, and together they create a transcendent moment (for the reader as well) in a ‘cracked and sad’ world where ‘everything was lit and love happened.’”             — MORE Magazine   “Using candid, staccato sentences that ricochet off the page like bullets on metal, the full array of Esther’s emotions about what happened to her—anger, self-loathing, fear, remorse—is respectfully portrayed and duly felt . . . Too, Minot jabs at the heart of what it means to be white and privileged in a world riddled