Little Beast [Paperback]

Its 1944, and a little village in rural Quebec sits quietly beside an aging mountain and an angry river. The air tastes of kelp, and the wind keeps knocking over the cross. Beside that river an eleven-year-old girl lives with her parents. Her mother is very sad, and her father has vanished because he cant bear to look at his own daughter. You see, this little girl has suddenly sprouted a full beard.

And so her mother has shut the curtains and locked the girl inside to keep her safe from the townspeople, the Boots, who think theres something wrong with a bearded little girl. And when they come for her, she escapes into the wintry night&

- extensive galley mailing- outreach to literary magazines- We'll be making a push for all our Quebecois translations as the next big thing. Currently they seem to be overlooked, but there are so many excellent ones.

A cryptic forest prayer, a tale of cruelty, the travelogue of a runaway,Little Beastweaves a remarkable tone with touches of raw naturalism, boreal surrealism, and dreamlike anthropomorphism. Demerss narration, with its classic childlike candor, contains a sort of brutality, revealing the hypocrisy of the adult world.
Le Devoir

Julie Demers lives in Montreal. This is her first novel. Rhonda Mullins won the Governor Generals Award for Translation and has translated many French novels into English.

A little girl with a beard must find herself a home in this contemporary fairy tale.

- Though Barbe is a fictional story, issues of gender and gender presentation are having a moment.- This is a beautiful novel, with the feel of a mid-century fairy tale.