A Scarcity of Love — Anna Kavan

Rejection, betrayal, and a girl's discovery of evil are the themes of this strange, haunting novel. Discarding such aids to realism as geography and mundane physical facts, this narrative tells the story of a young girl, rejected by her narcissistic and vengeful mother, whose life thereafter is a continuing series of betrayals that can lead only to the dead end of madness and death. Demonstrating a nearly perfect control over language, this tale describes, in the simplest and most ordinary of terms, the bizarre and hallucinatory landscape of derangement.