Tender Morsels

Tender Morsels is a novel by the Australian writer Margo Lanagan, published in 2008. It won the Ditmar Award for best novel and was joint winner of the World Fantasy Award in 2009.

The book is based on the Brothers Grimm story of Snow-White and Rose-Red, and its central figure is Liga, a fifteen-year-old girl who has been raped repeatedly by her father and who, when she is pregnant for the third time, attempts to take her own life. Instead of dying she is taken into a personal haven, a world shaped to give her what she needed: a house, a garden and a place to bring up her daughters, gentle Branza and wild Urdda, without the violence that made their mother who she is. What the novel then does is let the real world back in, because the border between the two places begins to break down and the people who come through it bring both harm and repair with them.

Lanagan writes for young adults and has said that she set out to write about the consequences of cruelty rather than to look away from it.