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We Pretty Pieces of Flesh

We Pretty Pieces of Flesh

Summary

A gut-punch novel of girlhood in early noughties Yorkshire from a blazing new voice

'Blistering, brilliant, savage and smart' EIMEAR McBRIDE
'Unforgettable...a wondrous, luminous novel' NANA KWAME ADJEI-BRENYAH
'Brilliant and original on every level... she is a writer like nobody else' ELIZABETH McCRACKEN

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 Doncaster’s also the home of Rach, Shaz and Kel, bezzies since childhood and Donny lasses through and through. They share everything, from blagging their way into nightclubs to taking pregnancy tests at Family Planning when they’re late. 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 — their friendship is as indestructible as they are. But as they grow up and away from one another, a long-festering secret threatens to rip the trio apart.

Written in a South Yorkshire dialect that brings a place and its people magnificently to life, 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. Like The Glorious Heresies and Shuggie Bain, it tracks hard-edged lives and makes them sing, turning one overlooked place into the very centre of the world.

'A novel brimming with rough poetry, heart and mischief' FERDIA LENNON

Reviews

  • 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

About the author

Colwill Brown

Colwill Brown was born and raised in Doncaster, South Yorkshire. She holds an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin, where she received a James A. Michener Center Fellowship, and an MA in English literature from Boston College. Her work has appeared in Granta, Prairie Schooner and other publications, and she has received scholarships, awards, and support from the Tin House Summer Workshop, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Hedgebrook, Ragdale, the Anderson Center, GrubStreet Center for Creative Writing, and elsewhere. For fifteen years she’s lived with ME/CFS, a debilitating neurological disease triggered by a virus that, due to systemic medical neglect, currently has no treatment. A proud Donny lass, she claims to have played bass guitar in (nearly) every rock venue on South Yorkshire’s toilet circuit.
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