Dead Girls

Dead Girls

:: Now Magazine's 2002 Book of the Year
:: Winner of the VanCity Book Prize
:: Finalist for the BC Book Prize and Danuta Gleed Award
:: Finalist for the Pearson Reader's Choice Award
        and Words Worthy Book Award.
:: Globe & Mail, Toronto Star and Vancouver Sun
        Best Books of 2002 selection


Selected Praise:

"In a clean, impeccable style, Nancy Lee brings to light what too often comes to lie at the core of love. These are moving and gripping stories--harsh, yet delivered with delicacy and compassion... Read them--and you will wake from a slumber you did not know you were in."

-Yann Martel, author of Life of Pi.

"Graceful and wintry, Nancy Lee's stories describe with beautiful, desolate precision a society that is itself dismembered, riven by loss and hunger."

- Guardian (UK)

“Beautifully penned, intensely moving stories... A masterwork of revelation and catharsis...What a gift is Nancy Lee. No review can tell you.”

– The Globe and Mail

"Lee's stories can be disturbing, yet they are redeemed by a humaneness in her writing, a sympathetically imagined depiction of hope and despair."

- Maclean's

"Brilliantly and thrillingly written. . . .While Dead Girls is indeed dark, it is written with compassion and lightning flashes of humour."

-The Herald (UK)

“Dead Girls has a can’t-put-it-down urgency. It’s about survival and toughness – and when you least expect it, hope.”

– Chatelaine

"Dead Girls is among the strongest fictional debuts in recent memory and heralds the arrival of a bold new voice in Canadian writing. . . .[A] disturbing, nervy, and ultimately thrilling debut."

- Quill & Quire (starred review)


From the book jacket:

Infused with eroticism, poignancy, and insight that cuts to the bone, these stories lead us into a tipping world of emotional wagers, loss and discovery, power and impulse. A marriage is tested as a mother struggles to cope with the disappearance of her prostitute daughter. Two angry women in a minivan act out their frustrations as they rampage through the night. A pill-dependent nurse juggles neuroses, infatuation, and exhaustion while supervising a high school dance-a-thon. A quiet tattoo artist takes in a homeless woman, and stumbles upon the true nature of beauty, jealousy, and love. Written in taut, unflinching prose, these stories are edgy and dark, sharply observed and uniquely imagined. As provocative as it is brilliant, Dead Girls introduces Nancy Lee as an astonishing and original new literary talent.

Excerpt from "Associated Press":

That boy works as a photographer for the Associated Press. He is at home in a suite at the Marriott Hotel, in a city whose name sounds like machine-gun fire. You keep in touch through e-mail. He sends you photos of human rights violations: the scarred backs of Chinese women, a severed hand at the side of the road, a secret mass grave. You send him photos of local atrocities: your father’s retirement cake in the shape of breasts, the words “Jesus Sucks” graffitied in etching gel across the windows of a church.

That boy is more social conscience than you can bear. His love letters are diatribes, global history lessons. He woos you with the blood of political unrest, the testimonials of broken refugees. Devotion disguised as the pain of strangers, something coded and hidden in newspaper clippings, wire-service announcements. When he does think to mention the curve of your back, the smell of your skin, his words are few and precious, grains of rice, drops of clean water.

In your last message, you wrote: A terrible thing has happened here. I've been selected for jury duty -- a man accused of killing prostitutes and burying them in his backyard. There will be crime scene photos.

Excerpted from Dead Girls by Nancy Lee Copyright © 2002 by Nancy Lee. Excerpted by permission of McClelland & Stewart. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without written permission from the publisher.