The Sweet Girl

Description

Aristotle has never been able to resist a keen mind in another, even in his own daughter, Pythias - a young girl who should be content with the kitchen, the loom and a future of childbearing. But she is really smart, able to best his own students in debate; is she a freak or a harbinger of what women can really achieve? Whichever is the case, hers is a privileged position, a woman who moves in a man's world, protected by the reputation of her philosopher father. Yet her entire life is set to change when Aristotle dies, leaving his daughter to discover that the world is a place not of logic but one of superstition, and that a girl can be preyed upon by gods and goddesses as much as by grown men and women.

Annabel Lyon is the author of two short story collections, Oxygen, and The Best Thing for You. She lives in British Columbia with her husband and two children. In 2009, she won the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize for her novel, The Golden Mean.

Intense, impressionistic and mysterious... This novel thrills in its immediacy and the family at its heart, in their love for each other, are instantly, captivatingly real * Daily Mail * Lyon is an extremely skilled historical novelist... She conjures a cruel, superstitious society in all its visceral otherness * Financial Times * Blurring the lines between history and myth, The Sweet Girl is a novel that confounds expectations. * Observer *