Mauve Desert

Fifteen-year-old Mélanie drives across the Arizona desert in a white Meteor, chasing fear and desire and the mysterious Angela Parkins, and breaking free from her mother and her mother’s lover in their roadside Mauve Motel. And then we are with Maude Laures as she reads Mauve Desert, this story of Mélanie, and becomes obsessed with it. She embarks on an extraordinary quest for its mysterious author, characters and meaning, which leads us into the third part, Mauve, the Horizon, Laures’s eventual translation of Mauve Desert – like all good translations, it is both the same and enticingly different from the original.

Nicole Brossard’s writing is agile and inventive, exhilarating and erotic; Margaret Atwood says it’s full of ‘brilliant sparks and white hot fragments.’ Originally published in 1990, Mauve Desert is a defining work of Canadian fiction and a perennial favourite.