Bitter Rose by Martine Delvaux , Translated by David Homel
A little girl is growing up in an Ontario village. Her father has taken off, and the world is full of dangers she doesn’t understand. Her friends have names like Manon-just-Manon, BB, and Valence Berri, and things seem pretty okay, most of the time, except that girls keep disappearing. When she leaves the village for a suburb of Ottawa and then moves downtown and beyond, she never looks back.
Extract
“I came into a world where no one spoke of men, they were not a subject of conversation because they didn’t really exist, or only as grandfathers, bosses, neighbours, doctors. Life was lived among girls. There was my grandmother and her slow-witted but malevolent sisters. There was my mother who worked all the time. And there was me.”
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