Praised for her bestselling 1989 debut memoir, Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid, Evelyn Lau continues to mesmerize readers with Fresh Girls and Other Stories, her first collection of short fiction. Written with characteristic intensity and honesty, Lau’s ten stories reveal the lonely underworld of “fresh girls” trapped in prostitution, sadomasochism and domination, searching for a place where sex, obsession and love can meet. In “Pleasure,” a woman finds “strange relief” in being blindfolded and restrained into an enforced helplessness that releases her from all worldly responsibility. The prostitute of “Marriage” asserts herself by toying with the idea of revealing her john’s infidelity. The complexity of her characters is extraordinary and Lau’s prose deftly explores the world where pleasure becomes pain and pain becomes addictive.

Raw, sensitive, and never sentimental, Fresh Girls shows us a world where turning tricks, donning leather and wielding a whip can become routine — while love and tenderness seem almost obscene. Most of all, domination allows you to escape touch.

PRAISE FOR RUNAWAY: DIARY OF A STREET KID

“Perhaps the most powerful and searing portrayal of street life in this country ever to emerge.”  — WINNIPEG FREE PRESS

“A compelling and unsettling journey into the mind of a teenage girl.”  — THE GLOBE AND MAIL

“In the world of elements, Lau is fire…In her writing the heat is unrelenting.”  — THE VANCOUVER SUN

“Lau is a writer of tremendous power. Runaway tells a gripping story, and its revelations about the workings of an adolescent’s mind are much more illuminating than a whole shelf of how-to-parent books.”  — BOOKS IN CANADA