The Good Girls
An Ordinary Killing
A shattering, utterly immersive work of investigative journalism, The Good Girls slips behind political maneuvering, caste systems and codes of honour in a village in northern India to tell the real story behind the tragic deaths of two teenage girls and an epidemic of violence against women.
In the early dawn one day in 2014, a man discovered the dead bodies of 14-year-old Lalli Shakya and 16-year-old Padma Shakya hanging from a mango tree on the edge of their village in Uttar Pradesh. When the inseparable cousins hadn't returned from a walk to the fields to relieve themselves the evening before, their families had begun searching for them. Upon hearing of the discovery and reaching the bodies, the grief-stricken women of…
SONIA FALEIRO is the award-winning author of Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay's Dance Bars, named the Sunday Times Travel Book of the Year, and a novella, The Girl. She is a co-founder of a global journalism collective, Deca, which publishes long-form stories to read on mobile devices. Her writing appears in The New York Times, The Financial Times, Harper's, Granta, and MIT Technology Review. She lives in London.