The Good Girls by Sonia Faleiro
The factual background of this book is already striking. Padma and Lalli, two lower-middle class teenage girls, go missing from their unremarkable Western UP village in the summer of 2014. They are found hanging from a mango tree. Their family refuses to allow the bodies to be brought down till justice is done.
Sonia Faleiro's treatment of this true story makes for an arresting and ultimately brilliant book of narrative non-fiction. Her measured prose and short, sharp chapters race along at the pace of a thriller, peeling back the insidious brutality of family and social life in one of the most conservative parts of Northern India.
Two things in particular made this book remarkable for me.
First, The Good Girls illustrates in sharp relief how the lives of the poor in India are inhabited by unrelenting violence. Actual physical violence, and the psychological violence engendered by criss-crossing hierarchies of caste, gender and political and administrative power. In doing so, Faleiro tells you truths you already know but that shock you nonetheless in their (re-)telling.
Second, there is a mesmerising aural quality to Faleiro's writing that strongly reminded me of Sarah Koenig's narration of the podcast Serial (also from 2014), which arguably brought the medium of podcasting into the popular imagination. You feel like Faleiro is reading the story out to you. She draws you close into the lives of the characters as human beings, with plot twists and progressive revelations forcing you to take sides - and then switch them - and then switch them back again. And despite the fact that you read the story in the news at the time and know how it ends, you are stunned by the denouement.
Strongly recommended.