“Electrifying”
-Mark Haddon
“Indelible”
-Publishers Weekly
“Unforgettable”
-Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
“Essential”
-The Guardian
“Like the most beguiling fiction about friendship and girlhood, Brown’s heartful, humane debut will pull readers in and make them wonder how anyone survives either.” Booklist.
“Indelible. . . . This sharp and tender novel teems with life.” Publishers Weekly.
“Blistering, brilliant, savage and smart. This is a superb debut and Colwill Brown is the real thing.” Eimear McBride, author of A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing.
“Colwill Brown is, simply, brilliant and original on every level; I haven’t read a first book that floored me so thoroughly since Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing. We Pretty Pieces of Flesh is astonishing, as hilarious and wrenching as life itself. Her characters and sentences knock around my brain still, moving, unsettling, indelible. She is a writer like nobody else.” Elizabeth McCracken, author of The Hero of This Book and the National Book Award Finalist The Giant’s House.
“With this debut, Colwill Brown announces herself as unforgettable. The music and precision of her language, the fun and fervor of her characters, all these things make We Pretty Pieces of Flesh a wondrous, luminous novel.” Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of the National Book Award finalist Chain-Gang All-Stars.
“Electrifying … written in what feels like a new and utterly distinctive female voice, it is very hard to put down.” Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in The Night-Time.
“Colwill Brown's We Pretty Pieces of Flesh is a kinetic and incantatory portrait of the rough-and-tumble world of girlhood. I fell headlong for the tough, vulnerable, and whip-smart characters at the center of this spectacularly original debut.” Laura van den Berg, author of State of Paradise.
“A big, brave, beautiful scream of a book. It is haunting and hilarious and heartbreaking, so tender, so raw, so deeply felt, so full of insight and sympathy and, above all else, so exquisitely written. We Pretty Pieces of Flesh is a rare wonder of a book and Colwill Brown is a writer of astounding originality.” Edward Carey, author of Edith Holler.
“Following Kel, Shaz and Rach’s lives from childhood to adulthood is a bit like watching King Lear being acted out every day. The stakes are so high, the passions so deep, the triumphs so vivid, but happily, in the face of many missed buses and betrayals, they have each other and another voddy and kebab. We Pretty Pieces of Flesh is one of the most remarkable portraits I’ve ever read of friendship.” Margot Livesey, author of The Road from Belhaven.
“Tender and raucous, Shaz, Kel and Rach’s friendship is brilliantly realized. We Pretty Pieces of Flesh is a novel brimming with rough poetry, heart and mischief.” Ferdia Lennon, author of Glorious Exploits.
“Colwill Brown is a tremendous writer — tender and tough, compassionate and sharply funny. We Pretty Pieces of Flesh is extraordinary — I grew to love Rach, Kel and Shaz as if they were my own childhood friends. A blazingly brilliant novel by a writer who, luckily for us, is just getting started.” Molly Antopol, author of The UnAmericans.
“In propulsive, strikingly original prose, Colwill Brown conjures girlhood in all its glittering potential and brutality.” Tyler Wetherall, author of Amphibian.
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An exuberant and ribald debut novel about three adolescent girls, as sweetly vulnerable as they are cunning and tough, coming of age in a gritty postindustrial town in nineties and noughties Yorkshire, England.
“Ask anyone non-Northern, they’ll only know Donny as punch line of a joke or place they changed trains once ont way to London.” But it’s also the home of Rach, Shaz, and Kel, bezzies since childhood and Donny lasses through and through. Never mind that Rach is skeptical of Shaz’s bolder plots; or that Shaz, who comes from a rougher end of town, feels left behind when the others begin charting a course to uni; or that Kel sometimes feels split in two trying to keep the peace – the girls are inseparable, their friendship as indestructible as they are. But as they grow up and away from each other, a long-festering secret threatens to rip the trio apart.
We Pretty Pieces of Flesh takes you by the hand and leads you through Doncaster’s schoolyards, alleyways and nightclubs, laying bare the intimate treacheries of adolescence and the ways we betray ourselves when we don’t trust our friends. Written in a Yorkshire dialect that brings a place and its people magnificently to life, the novel spans decades as its heroines come of age, never shying from the ugly truths of girlhood. Like The Glorious Heresies, Trainspotting, and Shuggie Bain, it tracks hard-edged lives and makes them sing, turning one overlooked place into the very centre of the world.
