Alfred Hickling

Assuming you make it past the excruciating title, it's well worth making the acquaintance of Maria Thomas, an American aid worker stationed in East Africa in the mid-1970s, who wrote a number of short stories and this remarkably accomplished novel before her death in an air crash in 1989. Antonia, an American doctor running a dilapidated field hospital, develops a strong emotional bond with Esther Moro, a village girl disfigured first by a female circumcision ceremony and then by a drunken sailor with a broken bottle.