I Saw Hell Then God

Diane has never been any trouble to anybody.

First in her class. First up every morning. The daughter who never has to be asked twice. So when an older girl with money notices her in a school yard, nobody thinks to ask where Diane goes on Saturday nights. Nobody asks about the money missing from the tin behind the flour. Nobody asks what is in the bag she carries up the hill.

Then, one Friday night, a torch finds it.

Taken without charge to a place with no sign on the gate, Diane is locked in a room with a hundred and thirty other young people. Two mouthfuls of water a day. The trench once every morning. The stick at half past five. Nobody writes her name down, so her family cannot find her, and everything she has ever known how to do, being good, being polite, being useful, buys her nothing at all.

But a woman who has been there five months answers her questions. A friend she betrayed holds her head up in the dark. And on a concrete floor on Christmas Eve, a girl who has never once meant a prayer begins, without believing, to say one anyway.

I Saw Hell Then God is an unflinching, deeply human novel about a family that cannot say what it knows, a young woman who has spent her whole life earning love, and the discovery that what she could never earn had been given freely, by the One who knew her name all along.

For readers of Purple Hibiscus and The Girl with the Louding Voice, and for anyone who has ever performed goodness in order to be loved.

Content note: this novel depicts detention, physical abuse and drug use. It contains no sexual content.