Anjali Sachdeva

Anjali Sachdeva's new story collection is All The Names They Used For God. From the transcript of her NPR interview with Audie Cornish:

CORNISH: In another story, "All The Names For God," two young girls who had been living in Nigeria kidnapped by Boko Haram figure out a way to I guess take over the minds of their captors.

SACHDEVA: Yes.

CORNISH: And they try and go home. But they are so different, right? They're so changed. They can't look even at their own male relatives the same way.

SACHDEVA: They've been away for years, right? And if you came back to your own family after years, and not only that but you had left as a child and came back as an adult and everything in the middle had been horrible, how would you be a different person? So a lot of it has to do with trust. There is a moment where the main character, Promise, goes home and meets her brother who was still a child when she left, and now he's an adult. And she is trying to separate him in her mind from the other men she's met in the intervening years who have done nothing but harm her or who she has treated as predators - any man she's met since then because of the experiences she's had. And now suddenly there's someone who...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue