When All the Girls Stopped Singing

A journey into unspeakable atrocities, 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 human atrocities. 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 evil 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.

 
Susan Burgess-Lent is a novelist, essayist, and veteran international aid worker. Her professional life also included a stint in television journalism as a news editor with NBC, CBS, Voice of America, and other broadcasters. 
Susan is the founder of Women's Centers International, creating safe resource spaces for women affected by war and poverty. She previously served as Program Director for the Darfur Peace and Development Organization, assisting the recovery of primary schools and creating the first two Women's Centers in Sudan.
Susan is the author of the novel When All the Girls Stopped Singing (2026), the memoir Trouble Ahead: Dangerous Missions with Desperate People (2019) and the novel In the Borderlands (2000).  She writes womanist commentary on SubStack and lives with her family in Oakland, California.