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Girls Burn Brighter

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About this listen

An electrifying debut novel - the story of the unbreakable bond between two girls driven apart, and their journeys across continents to find each other again.

Poornima and Savitha, born in poverty, have known little kindness in their lives until they meet as teenagers. When an act of devastating cruelty drives Savitha away, Poornima leaves behind everything she has ever known to find her friend.

Alternating between the girls' perspectives as they face apparently insurmountable obstacles on their travels through the darkest corners of India's underworld and across an ocean, Girls Burn Brighter introduces two heroines who refuse to lose the hope that burns within.

©2018 Shobha Rao (P)2018 Hachette Audio UK Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction

Critic reviews

"A treat for Ferrante fans, exploring the bonds of friendship and how female ambition beats against the strictures of poverty and patriarchal societies." (Huffington Post)
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Beautiful written almost poetic at times, with a childish innocence to it.

However the content is not childish, it is brutish, raw and shocking, explaining the the lives of the two Indian girls Poornima and Savitha as they become friends and then part company due to circumstances.(No spoilers)

My only criticism is the ending was very weak when it had packed such a powerful punch throughout the book,

Narration was excellent, delivered at times with almost a tear in the narrators voice.

The horrors of being a poor Indian girl

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This book was so grim. Felt drained and sad after reading it. Kept hoping something good would happen but it never did.

Utterly depressing and sad

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The reader sounds pained throughout. It’s a difficult story, sure, but hearing just one emotion solidly - especially when describing food (which is at least 30% of the story and is a problem in itself) and becomes unbeatably irritating. You go through some really dark stories and I don’t feel like there’s sufficient return for that. It feels like there’s a whole missing section. Hearing a man we don’t know tell a story about people we don’t know, for ages when the protagonist can’t even understand the language he’s talking in was just frustrating. The whole story is so laboured that what i found out took place over four year - I was certain was about 15. Too much description, too meandering and nothing of what I wanted to hear about at the end. A real shame and a bit of a waste.

Should be great but meanders and labours unnecessarily painfully

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