We Pretty Pieces of Flesh: A Novel [Hardcover]

Shortlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
Longlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel

This lacerating, exhilarating debut novel . . . manages to be both boisterous and bleak, life-enhancing and life-denying, familiar and yet wholly original. It feels essential. You will probably read nothing else like it this year.
The Guardian

A brilliant portrait of female friendship, nearly the equal in honesty and subtlety to Elena Ferrantes Neapolitan novels.
Kirkus Reviews(starred review)

Anexuberant 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 Yorkshire, England

Ask anyone non-Northern, theyll only know Donny as punchline of a joke or place they changed trains once ont way to London. But Doncasters also the home of Rach, Shaz, and Kel, bezzies since childhood and Donny lasses through and through. Never mind that Rach is skeptical of Shazs bolder plots; or that Shaz, who comes from a rougher end of town, feels left behind when the others begin plotting a course to uni; or that Kel sometimes feels split in two trying to keep the peacethe girls are inseparable, their friendship 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 Yorkshire dialect that brings a place and its people magnificently to life, Colwill Browns debut novel spans decades as its heroines come of age, never shying from the ugly truths of girlhood. LikeTrainspottingandShuggie Bain,We Pretty Pieces of Fleshtracks hard-edged lives and makes them sing, turning one overlooked and forgotten town into the very center of the world.