It’s the early 1970s when 16-year-old Rowena Savoury is raped under a wharf in her coastal Newfoundland town. Armed only with a little sexual education and her conviction, Rowena travels to St. John’s for an illegal abortion. When complications arise and she faces investigation, her story begins to entwine everyone it touches,
In Night Ambulance, Nicholas Ruddock strips away the politics and policies that have trapped and defined women for decades and gets to the heart of the people who live with these decisions. Using pared down language and stark scenes Ruddock reveals a world controlled by men – rapists, disapproving uncles, policemen, law-makers – and the women who navigate this system desperate to escape the hold on their own bodies. In whispers, names of doctors jotted on notes, and quiet bargaining, Ruddock’s tense warning could easily be a vision of the future in a novel as poignant as it is painfully hopeful.
Night Ambulance
By Nicholas Ruddock
$19.95, paperback, 256 pp.
Breakwater Books, 2016
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