Girls Burn Brighter

Shobha Rao Fleet €16.99 Poornima and Savitha are unloved, unwanted girls in a society that overwhelmingly favours boys. Living in poverty in rural India, the teenagers’ luminous friendship is all that sustains them. When Savitha is savagely attacked and flees their village of Indravalli, Poormina is determined to find her, heading out into a world where domestic abuse, sexual violence and human trafficking are visited on women with unremitting regularity. The friends narrate alternate chapters, and Rao’s prose is never less than elegant and eloquent. All the same, this emotionally devastating story is at times almost too harrowing to read.

Eithne Farry