Roxane Gay has made her name as a professor of creative writing, feminist essayist, and commentator on politics and popular culture. She embodies the feminist precept, ‘the personal is political’. Her book of essays Bad Feminist came out this year and has been a bestseller. An Untamed State is her debut novel, a gruelling but necessary read that incorporates the personal and political in abundance.

The novel introduces the reader to the protagonist, Mireille Duval, a lawyer happily married to Michael, with a young baby, Christophe. The family lives in the US but are in Haiti visiting Mireille’s parents in the opulent home that her businessman father has worked hard to attain despite growing up in poverty. When Mireille and her husband leave the gates of the home, however, she is pulled from the car by kidnappers. And thus begins thirteen days of imprisonment.

Mireille is a stubborn woman and some readers will find her difficult to understand or like. But it is impossible not to feel compassion as she experiences deprivation and degradations at the hands of seven male kidnappers, and the particularly vicious ‘Commander’.

The kidnappers are the product of a lawless society and resent the imbalance of wealth in Haiti. Mireille defends her father, who will not give in to their demand for one million dollars, telling them that he’s not like the corrupt police or politicians, that he’s worked hard for his achievements.

However, as the days go by and what she endures becomes worse and worse, she comes to question all that her father stands for. Thankfully, Mireille is released, but she is physically and psychologically traumatised. The next part of the book follows her equally harrowing journey back from the point of breakdown.

While some of characters are slightly one-dimensional, there is no doubt this is a powerful book. The dedication is simply ‘For women, the world over,’ but it is by no means a novel solely for women.

Annie Condon