“I was a girl once, but not any more.”
Captured, abducted and married into Boko Haram, Maryam witnesses and suffers the horrors of a
community of men governed by a brutal code of violence.
Barely more than a girl herself, she must soon learn how to survive as a woman with a child of her
own. Just as the world around her seems entirely consumed by madness, bound for hell, she is offered
an escape of sorts — but only into another landscape of trials and terrors amidst the unforgiving
wilds of northeastern Nigeria, through the forest and beyond; a place where her traumas are met with
the blinkered judgement of a society in denial.
We'll be reading Girl by Edna O'Brien though we won't be at The Didsbury on Wilmslow Road in Didsbury on 15 October 2026.