School for Girls

A boarding school deep in the forest carries the echoes of its past inhabitants. Hints of a disturbing history and the unfolding events of the present are refracted by the multiple voices of the girls who now live within its walls, their suggestive and enigmatic accounts interweaving in a rich and unsettling chorus. When the winter months are skewered by a terrible accident, cracks begin to appear between the teachers and pupils as the girls navigate adolescence, their place in the group, and their complex and shifting relationships with each other, as well as the natural world that surrounds them and the seasons that shape their existence.

Ariane Lessard was born in 1990 in Lévis, not far from a monastery of cloistered sisters. She published her first novel, Feue, in 2018, which was a finalist for the Rendez-vous du premier roman, a first novel award. She also took part in the first residency of L'Hôtel des autrices in 2020, a feminist digital platform created in Berlin during the pandemic, in which she wrote a novel in one month. School for Girls is her first novel to be translated into English. Frances Pope is a translator and writer from the UK. She lived in Montreal between 2015 and 2020, where she received her MA in translation studies from Concordia University. Now living in Bristol (UK), she continues to translate in the arts and non-profit sectors, as well as reviewing and writing about electronic music. Frances has two published collections of poetry, Quarters (Ekstasis Editions) and The Brazen Forecast (Cactus Press), both published in 2020.