Congratulations to Suzanne Desrochers whose historical novel Bride of New France which has been named by Quill & Quire in the Top 5 Fiction Books of the Year.
Bride of New France is published by
CANADA (English) : Penguin
US: W.W. Norton
World in French: Éditions Hurtubise HMH
Bride of New France by Suzanne Desrochers is the fictionalized account of a Fille du Roi.
“In her first novel, Suzanne Desrochers recreates the brutal and often cruel circumstances they endured, combining imaginative insight with meticulous research (the book began as a master’s thesis in history at York University). Its strength, however, lies in tracing the unique contours of one woman’s life against a dramatic backdrop, making it a bookseller favourite and one of the year’s unqualified word-of-mouth successes.”
– Quill & Quire
In the mid-1600s, over 800 Parisian girls were sent to Canada to give birth to a nation. These women became the founding mothers of French North America. Laure Beausejour was one of them. Laure was taken from her destitute parents by archers and brought to the Salpetriere, Paris’ infamous women’s prison and poorhouse. In 1669, Laure gets sent against her will across the Atlantic to New France.
After a torturous sea journey, Laure faces coming into womanhood in a colony that is rudimentary, and at its worst, brutally dangerous. From the moment she arrives in Ville-Marie (Montreal), she is expected to marry and produce children with a French soldier who can barely survive the harsh conditions of his forest cabin.
Suzanne shares about her inspiration for the novel on Penguin’s site.