Cloud Girls

Following the 2021 U.S. publication of Harding’s second work, Bright Burning Things, her Kate O’Brien Award–winning first novel recounts the lives of two young girls, one from Moldova and one from Ireland, who are duped into the billion-dollar global sex trade. Sold to traffickers by her father, Nico is told that she will marry the man who takes her away but soon finds out this is not the case. Sammy, the child of an absent father and a mother who’s addicted to alcohol, eventually abandons her uncertain home life for work in the sex trade, thinking she can control what happens to her there. Both girls eventually end up in the same house outside of Dublin. They have no identification, no money, and no freedom; they are escorted to every job and locked in when they return “home.” One night, Sammy is badly beaten by the man she is with, and witnesses take action, but her fate at the end remains uncertain.