Seven years ago this April 14, armed Boko Haram terrorists kidnapped 276 school girls in the remote Nigerian town of Chibok. Fifty-seven of them managed to escape by jumping onto the highway as the trucks into which they’d been forced were driving away. The Boko Haram convoy continued on, taking the remaining 219 hostages to a destination, and a fate, unknown.

In Bring Back Our Girls: The Untold Story of the Global Search for Nigeria’s Missing Schoolgirls, Wall Street Journal reporters Joe Parkinson and Drew Hinshaw, who were based in Africa at the time, present the story in gripping detail. The girls’ return remained elusive for years, until the release or escape of 107 of the girls between 2016 and 2017.

The school girls’ ordeal is central to the book, revealed through lengthy interviews conducted by the authors with 20 of those girls. Their accounts revealed brutal beatings, repeated death threats, near-starvation conditions and ongoing coercion to convert to Islam and enter into forced marriages with Boko Haram fighters. They were held mostly in Boko Haram base camp huts hidden in the Sambisa Forest.

Of the other 112, who remain officially unaccounted for, the authors estimate that at least 40 have died.

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