Milk Teeth
The literary hit of the summer
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
'Consuming and sexy' The Times
'Unusually raw . . . so honest and hopeful' Financial Times
☀️ ☀️ ☀️
A girl grows up in the north-east of England amid scarcity, fearing her own desires and feeling undeserving of love. Years later, living in tiny rented rooms and working in noisy bars across London and Paris, she meets someone who offers her a new way to experience the world.
But when he invites her to join him in Barcelona, the promise of care makes her uneasy. In the shimmering Mediterranean heat, she is faced with both pleasure and shame, and must find out if she is able to change.
'Addictive, immediate, brilliant' Helen Mort
'A sharp and beguiling love story . . . Milk Teeth is a transporting, gorgeous novel' Independent
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
“We learned the language of self-destruction,” goes one paragraph Milk Teeth, “in hip bones and heroin chic. The women we admired could do anything if they were skinny and beautiful enough.” Jessica Andrews’ second novel—the follow-up to her stunning 2019 debut Saltwater—lays bare the damage of such early 2000s’ diet-culture ideals, as it introduces us to a young, unnamed female character who grew up shaped by them. We meet her in present-day London, as she begins to fall in love with a man who forces her to reckon with the independence she has always maintained to guard herself. Flitting between her younger years in the north-east—with memories coloured by her absent father and still-painful comments around her appetite—and the present, and set between England, Barcelona and Paris, Milk Teeth explores belonging, desire, hunger and the suppression of it (with disordered eating a prominent theme here). Short, propulsive chapter and lyrical, absorbing prose make it easy to speed through, but Milk Teeth is also a novel to marvel at and treasure, and which will stay with you.
