Girl was published by Faber and Faber in 2019, and it is O’Brien’s most remarkable act of imaginative empathy. At eighty-eight, the grande dame of Irish letters chose to tell the story not of an Irish woman but of a Nigerian schoolgirl — one of the 276 girls kidnapped from their school in Chibok by Boko Haram in 2014. O’Brien traveled to Nigeria, interviewed survivors, and produced a novel that is both a harrowing account of captivity and a testament to the human capacity for endurance.
The narrator, Maryam, tells her story in the first person — a choice that carries enormous weight, given that the real Chibok girls have largely been unable or unwilling to tell their stories publicly. O’Brien’s ventriloquism has been questioned (can a white Irish woman speak for a Black Nigerian girl?) but the novel earns its authority through the precision and restraint of its writing. Maryam’s voice is clear, direct, and devastatingly specific: the details of captivity — the hunger, the beatings, the forced marriage to a jihadi fighter, the birth of a child in the forest — are rendered without sensationalism or false consolation.
The novel’s second half follows Maryam’s escape and return to a society that does not know how to receive her. She is a victim and a survivor, but she is also — in the eyes of her community — contaminated by her association with Boko Haram. Her child, fathered by a jihadi, is a living reminder of the violence she endured. The ostracism she faces after her “rescue” is in some ways more devastating than the captivity itself, because it comes not from enemies but from the people who should love her.
O’Brien connects Maryam’s story to her own lifelong themes with subtlety rather than heavy-handedness. The patriarchal violence that O’Brien has always written about — the control of women’s bodies, the punishment of female desire, the collusion of communities in women’s oppression — finds its most extreme expression in Boko Haram’s kidnapping, but the underlying dynamics are recognizable from the Irish novels. Girl is the capstone of O’Brien’s career: a book that demonstrates that the concerns of her early fiction — women’s autonomy, women’s suffering, women’s resilience — are not local or parochial but universal.
Collecting Girl
First edition (Faber and Faber, London, 2019): Cloth, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $15–$40
- American first (Farrar, Straus and Giroux): $10–$25
- Signed copies: $50–$150
O’Brien’s final novel and a fitting conclusion to one of the most important careers in modern fiction.