When All the Girls Stopped Singing

By: Susan Burgess-Lent

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

A journey into conflict, family, and the cost of telling the truth.

When Zora Monro’s mother dies, she leaves behind a revelation that shatters everything Zora believed about herself: she was adopted and her origins trace to a country being torn apart by war. Zora abandons her work as a spokeswoman for a human rights organization and travels to Sudan in search of her blood relatives. The journey opens a dangerous web of shifting alliances, unbridled greed, and state-sanctioned violence.

Guided through a daunting landscape by men whose loyalties become uncertain, she uncovers a brutal family history. In the ruins of a torched village, Zora finds the shattered family she never knew: her uncle Luk and a young teenager named Abuk who faces a terrifying future. Zora is asked to take Abuk to America, a startling request that forces her to confront what it means to claim family not by choice but from a sense of duty.

Back home in Washington, DC, as Zora slowly discovers how to nurture a deeply traumatized girl, she also holds evidence capable of exposing the hidden forces behind the predatory regime. But finding the right channel to share this information could prove fatal to Zora and to those she loves.

WHEN ALL THE GIRLS STOPPED SINGING is a haunting, urgent novel about the bonds that emerge when survival demands responsibility in the face of profoundly inhuman events.