August is Women in Translation Month—a perfect time to celebrate Fanny Britt’s Governor General Award-winning novel, Sugaring Off, which has an English translation forthcoming this fall with Book*hug Press, translated by seven-time Governor General Award-winner, Susan Ouriou.

The Governor General Literary Award jury called Sugaring Off , “[a]n accurate, uncomplacent depiction of Western society and of the disparity that exists between classes and ethnicities, this brilliantly written story joins the family of great North American novels and asks one fundamental question: however privileged we may be, is it possible to live without relying on others? In this clever and lucid fresco, complex characters are confronted with crises which are not unconnected to the paradoxes inhabiting them.”

Bring home ***Sugaring Off*** (Book*hug Press, October 8, 2024).

More about Sugaring Off:

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, Fanny 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 the resulting friction between pleasure and consequence.

We are pleased to share an excerpt from this remarkable novel, as well as more information about author Fanny Britt and translator Susan Ouriou.

Excerpt: Sugaring Off by Fanny Britt, translated by Susan Ouriou

Félix claimed that the time for Facebook had come and gone, that only old fogies and activists still used it, and that you had to wade through the swamp of spiteful or trivial comments before finding anything of interest.

People his age, he said, were found on Instagram.

Well, if Celia had signed up for Instagram, it must be under a pseudonym because Marion hadn’t found her there. She did show up on on Facebook, and Marion managed to find out that three years earlier, she had gone on a school trip to Washington, where she posed in front of the statue of Abraham Lincoln.

Next came a few group photos taken in restaurants that had been posted by members of her family—in fact, almost nothing on Celia’s page had been posted by her.

For no particular reason, Marion went back to the page a few hours before the choir’s Christmas concert. She should have been drinking herbal tea to soothe her throat and using the flatiron to look presentable, but there she sat at the kitchen table in front of the computer as evening fell. Adam wasn’t home— he’d meet up with her at the church, he said in his text message; he was held up with some task or other at the Sweets’.

She didn’t find anything much that was new. Two or three pictures and a video of the small saltwater taffy factory where Celia worked. The workshop doubled as a shop: customers could choose among over forty flavours of soft taffy. Lemon, caramel, strawberry, mint, licorice, grape. The video showed how the taffy was made using a machine with large hooks that stretched the rope, and Celia’s hands and arms could be seen inserting it into some sort of gear the equipment looked to be straight out of another era—from which emerged machine-wrapped candies in wax paper.

Marion had to watch the video twice to be sure it really was her since her face could only be seen for a few seconds and her hair was hidden beneath a white hairnet. She looked so young. But Celia was, in fact, young, wasn’t she? She had the open gaze of a child; her face shadowed by huge bags under her eyes, and her oversize T-shirt sporting the logo of the taffy shop made her look like an orphan, one who was trundled here and there, her only clothing ill-fitting odds and ends that had been scrounged from a lost-and-found bin.

Captions with catchy phrases were designed to attract tourists to Martha’s Vineyard for a taste of the authentic east coast. So, this was how Celia spent her days before the tragedy? Had she hoped to take over the family business and, after much hard work and many a setback, open a branch and make her ancestors proud?

Except that, since July, she’d written nothing on social media. Only one comment in response to a girlfriend’s post on her page, something cryptic and innocuous about a kitsch reality show the two seemed to find amusing. The comment, written a few weeks earlier, was proof that Celia was still alive and able to write, two things Marion found reassuring. But the girl’s inactivity bothered her. Alive and able to write did not mean she might not be in a pitiful state. Maybe she was bedridden, in a wheelchair, paralyzed by chronic shooting pain that left her haggard and depressed. Maybe she’d lost her boyfriend, too much of a coward to look after a young woman who’d been disabled. Not to mention the barbarity of the U.S. health system and Celia was not well-to-do; everything pointed to that fact, her clothes, the places she hung out, no, she probably had very little insurance coverage and had to work herself ragged to pay for her treatment. Not to mention the trips to the hospital, calculating the cost of gas and compensating for her disability at work. Under those kinds of conditions, who would feel carefree enough to write rubbish on a dying social network, as though life still went on? Marion shuddered and turned off the computer.

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. Sugaring Off 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.