From Meet Us by the Roaring Sea, a novel, which was published last month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

We were eighteen the summer of the drought. The cow’s milk tasted of water and the harvest had shriveled to half-formed things. Onions the size of chicken eggs were pulled from the ground, as were lentils the color of the sky, the same bright blue as the dye from the garment factory. At Saint Mary’s Hostel, we survived off boiled peanuts and rice porridge. That single meal was meant to last us the whole day. The hunger was a lesson…