Bride of New France by Suzanne Desrochers (Penguin Canada)
Growing up in the Salpêtrière, the notorious Paris hospital that housed society’s unwanted women, Laure Beausejour can hardly imagine a worse fate. That is, until she is sentenced to an even more uncertain future: exile in Canada, where she is sent by decree of Louis XIV to help populate the colony of New France.
Laure is one of the filles du roi, women (or, in many cases, girls) celebrated as “founding mothers” of Quebec but about whom little is known. 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.
