Sugaring Off
Description
Longlisted for the 2025 Giller Prize and winner of the Governor General's Literary Award for French-Language Fiction, Sugaring Off probes intimacy, denial, and how we are tied to others--whether those we love or those we exploit.
On the surface, Adam and Marion are the embodiment of success: wealthy, attractive, in love. While holidaying in Martha's Vineyard, Adam surfs into a local young woman, Celia. The accident leaves her injured and financially at risk; for Adam and Marion, it opens a fault of loneliness, rage, and desires that have too long been ignored.
Like a modern Virginia Woolf, Britt abrades the surface layer of our outward personas, delving into the complexity and contradictions of relationships. In this eviscerating critique of privilege, she asks what happens when one can no longer play a role--whether in a couple, family, or social structure--and exposes the resulting friction between pleasure and consequence.
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Persons
FANNY BRITT is a playwright, writer, and translator. She is the winner of multiple Governor General's Literary Awards, a Libris Award, a Joe Shuster Award, and was nominated for a Governor General's Literary Award for Children's Literature. Faires les sucres won the Governor General's Literary Award for French-language Fiction in 2021. Britt has written a dozen plays and translated more than fifteen works by many American, Canadian, British, and Irish playwrights. Born in Northern Quebec, Britt lives in Montreal.
SUSAN OURIOU is an award-winning literary translator (French and Spanish to English) and fiction writer. She has been a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award for Translation on seven occasions, winning for her translation of Pieces of Me by Charlotte Gingras. She also translated Catherine Leroux's The Future, winner of 2024 CBC Canada Reads. Ouriou is also the author of two novels, Damselfish, and the critically acclaimed Nathan, and the editor of two anthologies, the trilingual Beyond Words: Translating the World and the bilingual Languages of Our Land: Indigenous Poems and Stories from Quebec. She lives in Calgary.