Praise for The Good Girls
New York Times Editors’ Choice
Financial Times Best Book of the Week
Marie Claire Best True Crime Book of 2021Longlisted for the ALCS Gold Dagger for Non Fiction
“The Good Girls is transfixing; it has the pacing and mood of a whodunit, but no clear reveal; Faleiro does not indict the cruelty or malice of any individual, nor any particular system. She indicts something even more common, and in its own way far more pernicious: a culture of indifference that allowed for the neglect of the girls in life and in death.” —Parul Sehgal, New York Times
“A riveting—sometimes astonishing—work of forensic journalism that chronicles the girls’ lives as well as the circumstances of their death." —Wall Street Journal
“Powerful . . . Her social analysis is enlightening . . . most poignant when it’s focused on the girls’ unfinished lives.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune “The story [Faleiro] weaves in exquisite language is as tragic and ugly as it is engrossing . . . A riveting, terrible tale, one all too common, but Faleiro’s gorgeous prose makes it bearable.” —New York Times Book Review
“A haunting piece of narrative reporting . . . Essential reading.”—Sunday Times (UK)
“A beautifully calibrated book, full of suspense to the final pages, urging us to walk into that night and listen.” —Guardian (UK)
"[A] gripping, real-life murder mystery... Taut with dramatic tension, The Good Girls vividly captures the sights, sounds, smells, preoccupations and oppressiveness of the village... [and] effectively captures the circus-like atmosphere that typically follows heinous crimes in India... Faleiro writes sensitively about her subjects’ actions and motivations." —Financial Times
"[A] compulsively readable, highly impressive work of reportage... The Good Girls is excellent, deeply felt nonfiction." —Shelf Awareness
“A modern-day Rashomon that offers multiple views of the widely publicized deaths of two young women in rural India…A gripping story.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Powerful account… In incisive prose, Faleiro…examines India’s family honor system and the grueling lives of lower caste women. True crime buffs will be fascinated.” —Publishers Weekly
“In this true story of the mysterious death of two girls, Sonia Faleiro confronts us with what it means to be young, poor, powerless and most importantly, female, in much of today's India. Despite its calm, measured tone, or more likely, because of it, The Good Girls left me shattered.” —Abhijit Banerjee, Nobel Prize winner
“The Good Girls is an insightful work of reportage that highlights how gender intersects with class and caste in Indian society. It’s a page-turner, a feminist text, and an essential read that is deeply empathetic toward its two main subjects who no longer have a voice.” —Deepa Anappara
"An extraordinary book studded with insights into media, justice, corruption, and the rules governing women's lives. Padma and Lalli—harvesting mint, enchanted by a play, seeking freedom, wishing to be something—will stay powerfully with me." —Megha Majumdar
“Chilling and devastating, The Good Girls is narrative reportage at its very best” —Fatima Bhutto
“A compulsively readable whodunit, as fast-moving as a mystery novel, and at a whole deeper level offers profound observations about caste and sexuality in rural India.” —Barbara Demick
Praise for Beautiful Thing
Sunday Times Travel Book of the Year
Time Out Subcontinental Book of the Year
Best Book of the Year by Economist, NPR, Guardian, San Francisco Chronicle, Kirkus, CNN Mumbai, and Observer
“With a few strokes, Faleiro conjures a world. ”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times
"A knockout. Unsparing, unsentimental and wickedly funny." —Parul Sehgal, NPR
"Gritty, gripping and often heartbreaking—an impressive piece of narrative non-fiction." —Kirkus (starred review)
“A tour de force of reportage, whose depth, insight and resonance make it the equal of the best fiction.” —Sunday Times
"Excellent, painstaking and often painful." — San Francisco Chronicle
“Faleiro brings a novelist’s eye for detail and a depth of empathy to her work. A magnificent book of reportage that is also endowed with all the terror and beauty of art.” —Kiran Desai
“Does what every good piece of reportage ought to: took me to a place I couldn't have gone by myself.” —Hari Kunzru
"A small masterpiece of observation." —William Dalrymple
"A tour de force of heartrending reportage." —Independent
"It is useless to describe the pathos and singular power of this book." —Spectator
"So compelling that it invites from us the question of exactly what might constitute genius in non-fiction." —The National
"Brilliant." —Guardian
"A moving testament." —Literary Review
"Astonishing, gripping, immersive." —Time Out
"Excellent." —Telegraph UK
2020-12-15
A modern-day Rashomon that offers multiple views of the widely publicized deaths of two young women in rural India.
In the summer of 2014, two teenagers, whom Faleiro calls Padma and Lalli, left their homes in the countryside of Uttar Pradesh, walking to a nearby orchard. Not long after, they were found hanging from a tree. An autopsy was inconclusive, but it seemed likely that the girls had been raped. Consequently, the village was swept up in a vortex of contending views on religion, caste, gender roles, women’s rights, and other thorny issues, all cogently explored by the author. The principal suspects were members of a low caste. “Their lives had been dismantled,” writes Faleiro, a sympathetic yet unrelenting investigator. “And not one politician, they said, not even one of their own, had come to see them, never mind offer them assistance of any sort….This is what it meant to be poor.” Other issues were at play, including the fact that the girls had dared use their cellphones in public—an act that proved, according to a society where women are untrustworthy, that they were seeking dangerous liaisons. As Faleiro carefully documents, the disappearance of the girls was not extraordinary: “In the year that Padma and Lalli went missing, 12,361 people were kidnapped and abducted in Uttar Pradesh, accounting for 16 per cent of all such crimes in India.” In a recent case, a wealthy businessman had murdered at least 17 people, some of them children, whose disappearances the police had not paid attention to precisely because they were poor. Padma’s and Lalli’s graves suffered a final indignity during a devastating flood, and while their case seems to resist definitive resolution, it shows that, “for the poor, who have always suffered the most, India hasn’t changed all that much.”
A gripping story that brings home the point that India may be “the worst place in the world to be a woman.
