Hardback: The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing (2021) is a masterly and agenda-setting inquest into how the deaths of two teenage girls shone a light into the darkest corners of a nation.
Katra Sadatganj. A tiny village in western Uttar Pradesh. A community bounded by tradition and custom; where young women are watched closely, and know what is expected of them.
It was an ordinary night in the spring of 2014 when two girls, 16-year-old Padma and 14-year-old Lalli, went missing.
The next day, their bodies were found - hanging in the orchard, their clothes muddied.
In the ensuing months, the investigation into their deaths would implode everything that their small community held to be true, and instigated a national conversation about sex, honour and violence.
The Good Girls returns to the scene of Padma and Lalli's short lives and shocking deaths, daring to ask: what is the human cost of shame?
*The girls' names have been changed in accordance with Indian law which requires that the identity of victims of certain crimes remain private.
About the author: Sonia Faleiro is the author of Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay’s Dance Bars, which was named a book of the year by the Guardian, Observer, Sunday Times, Economist and Time Out and a novella, The Girl. She is a co-founder of Deca, a cooperative of award-winning writers that created narrative journalism about the world. Her writing and photographs appear in the New York Times, Financial Times, Granta, 1843, Harper’s and MIT Technology Review. She lives in London.
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