Tender Morsels

Fifteen-year-old Liga, emotionally and physically battered from bearing two children, one begot through incest, the other through rape, is magically granted her own heaven, a gentle, patient version of the rough world she once knew. Here there are no brutal fathers, no leering village boys; there is only a beautiful little cottage in the middle of a wood. Here she brings up her two daughters, fair Branza and dark Urdda, in perfect peace. But the membrane between Liga's heaven and the real world has grown thin over the years, allowing some who are not as pure-hearted as Liga and her daughters to enter. And likewise, the girls discover they can pass through into the real world of Liga's tortured past. Now, having known heaven, how will these three women survive in a world where beauty and brutality lie side by side? "Tender Morsels" is an astonishing novel, fraught with the tension between beauty and horror, violence and tenderness.