This book is appropriately subtitled “The Road Where Childhoods are Stolen”. Movingly written, we are brought to love and agonise with little lilac-dressed Leilah, desperate-to-start-a-new-life Mariana and all the other broken girls we meet along that tragic highway BR116.

This book contains a wealth of otherwise hard-to-find facts about the often poverty-stricken and mostly unnoticed country folk in the diverse provinces and regions we now know as France. Everything warrants a chapter: food, clothing and housing; birth, marriage and death; farming and poaching practices; relationships between peasants, seigneurs, unwelcome soldiers, haughty priests and the revenue-hungry…