First published in French in 1937, Mouchette is the story (and the name) of a poor country girl who falls victim to a confidence trick while playing truant. Harassed at school, unloved at home, she's idling in the woods one day when she meets – with ominous symbolism – a poacher. Drunk, blood-stained, he has a tale to tell: he's just killed a man in a quarrel that got out of hand. But an alibi isn't all he wants from Mouchette – his real crime is yet to take place.

Georges Bernanos (1888-1948) was writing at the tailend of a tradition that had its heyday in the 19th century and always held more appeal across the Channel: the novel that shares a name with its downtrodden heroine and puts her on the rack while its (male) narrator watches on impassively. The almost anthropologically detached tone here can hit you for six with its cynicism. For instance: "Those girls are lucky in whom the first sexual experience arouses remorse or at least some emotion violent enough to overcome the formless anguish and desperate nausea which Mouchette felt."

This is no bucolic idyll. Every last detail is calculated to reap maximum pathos; not just the big things – Mouchette's sick mother dies with gut-wrenching timing – but the incidentals, too. A gossipy grocer consoles Mouchette with croissants that are (of course) stale; an old woman keeps a vigil over the dead, handing out sweets to the children of the bereaved – but not before she licks them clean of fluff from her pockets. It's easy to feel Bernanos has his thumb on the scales, yet far harder not to be moved, and even hearts of stone will bleed at the tragic climax. A short, sharp shock of a book, it packs great power on to its tiny canvas.