We Pretty Pieces of Flesh

Colwill Brown is, simply, brilliant and original on every level... We Pretty Pieces of Flesh is astonishing, as hilarious and wrenching as life itself

ELIZABETH McCRACKEN, author of The Hero of This Book

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

With this debut, Colwill Brown announces herself as unforgettable... a wondrous, luminous novel

NANA KWAME ADJEI-BRENYAH, author of Chain-Gang All-Stars

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

EDWARD CAREY, author of Edith Holler

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 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

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

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 voddie 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

A bold, rowdy, and compelling new voice in fiction

NAOMI BOOTH, author of Animals at Night

In propulsive, strikingly original prose, Colwill Brown conjures girlhood in all its glittering potential and brutality

TYLER WETHERALL, author of Amphibian

A brilliant portrait of female friendship, nearly the equal in honesty and subtlety to Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels

Kirkus (starred review)

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 (starred review)

Its gloriously individual voice makes this standout first novel glow with vigor and hope

Wall Street Journal

Dazzling... We don’t know the last book that captured teenage girlhood and female friendship this deftly

Oprah Daily

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

Catherine Taylor, Guardian