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I do like to depart from the detective fiction now and again and you can't get much farther away than The Virgin Cure - a tale of a 12 year old girl living in a New York slum in the nineteeth century, groomed for prostitution to a rich pervert. Difficult subject matter, difficult period. Was I going to get something mawkish, at best a cross between Pretty Baby and Angela's Ashes? Nope, I got a fine novel, one that is winning prize after prize and deservedly so.