The Girl with the Louding Voice, 2020, Abi Daré ****

Sometimes a book title alone is enough to make you pause. And then, a few pages in, you realise it has delivered on every promise it made. Abi Daré's debut novel introduces us to Adunni, a girl born and raised in a small village near Lagos, Nigeria. She loses her mother young, her father dismisses her hunger for education without a second thought, and she is married off as a teenager before she even has the chance to understand what womanhood might mean on her own terms. Raped and crushed by one calamity after another, she eventually finds herself in a car headed for Lagos, and it is precisely at that moment that this novel truly ignites. 

Once the city enters the picture, so does a whole constellation of characters, and Daré handles them with the confidence of someone who knows this world intimately, its textures, its hypocrisies, its warmth, its cruelty. At its core, this is a novel about what poverty and the absence of education do to a young girl's life. But it reaches further than that. It interrogates the condition of women in Nigeria across all social strata, because even those considered wealthy are shown to be products and prisoners of the same society. Class, religion, child marriage, child labour, opportunity, survival,  Daré packs all of it into a single narrative, and with so much ambition on the page, the story could easily have collapsed under its own weight, becoming messy, preachy, or overwhelming. But it doesn't. She carries it all without stumbling. That, in itself, is a remarkable feat for any novelist, let alone a debut.

What elevates this novel above many others with similar themes, though, is its voice. Adunni narrates her own story. In her own words. Imperfect, searching, luminous words, the English of a girl who was never given the schooling she desperately craved, yet whose intelligence and spirit blaze through every sentence. It is a creative choice that could easily have felt like a cheap trick in the hands of a less skilled writer, but Daré pulls it off with extraordinary care and sensitivity.  Reading Adunni's account of her own ordeal, in her own particular way of seeing and saying things, is quietly devastating and quietly triumphant all at once. It is, I think, what makes this novel special. Giving a voice to the voiceless, genuinely, artfully, without condescension, is one of the hardest things literature can do. This book does it.

If this story resonates with you, I'd point you toward two kindred spirits on the shelf:

• Imagine This by Sade Adeniran (2007)
• We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo (2013)

Both are also debuts. Both have been nominated for and won major awards. All three novels share a lineage of bold, unflinching storytelling about girlhood, displacement, and survivaland if you loved one, you will almost certainly love the others.

I'd place The Girl With The Louding Voice firmly in the Young Adult category, but with an asterisk: adults have just as much to learn from it, perhaps more. It would also make for extraordinary reading in schools, as a way of teaching young people about the privilege of education not through statistics, but through a girl who wanted nothing more than a pencil and a classroom, and who refused to stop wanting it.

I recommend it. Wholeheartedly.