Winner of the The Believer Book Award (2012)

On a mangy beach in Key West, sixteen-year-old Myra meets Elijah, a Tanzanian musician twice her age. Trapped on a Spring Break family vacation, Myra longs to lose her virginity to Elijah, and is shocked to learn he lives with Gayl, a secretive, violent woman with a strange power over him.

When Myra and her splitting-up family return home, she falls in with a pot-smoking anarchist crowd. But when Gayl and Elijah follow her north, she walks willingly into their world, engaging in more and more abject sexual games.

As Myra enters unfamiliar worlds of sex, porn, race and class, she explores territories unknown in herself. Maidenhead traverses the desperate, wild spaces of a teenage girl's self-consciousness.

'For those of us who secretly read V.C. Andrews and The Story of O under the covers with flashlights in early adolescence, Tamara Faith Berger is our grown-up literary saint. Her prose has consistently traversed extreme, forbidden territory, infusing filth with intelligence and sophistication unseen in much of Canadian literature.' National Post

'Maidenhead is a mesmerizing and important novel, lying somewhere between the wilds of Judy Blume, Girls Gone Wild, and Michel Foucault. It's a thrilling, brilliant, and really hot place to be.' Sheila Heti, Globe and Mail

'A dazzling and engaging writer . . . no other writer I can think of working now has dealt with female sexuality as accurately. The book is charming and incendiary.' Chris Kraus

'At the risk of sounding grandiose, Maidenhead is a masterpiece: a richly layered, complexly rendered, rhythmically written, and brilliantly executed meditation on power, desire, and consciousness.' Quill and Quire

'Maidenhead is a corrective to Houellebecq’s tales of sex starved, middle-aged masculinity, allowing us to see, finally, from the perspective of the budding slut herself ... [A] fast, engrossing, disquietingly erotic read.' Maisonneuve

Maidenhead is by turns creepy and seductive and unlike anything you’ll read this spring.’ Zoe Whittall, Fashion magazine

'Everyone interested in literary erotica will agree that [Berger] makes a unique contribution to the genre.' NOW magazine