Brass
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
In this “spellbinding and utterly unique” coming of age novel, a nineteen-year-old Liverpool student drifts into a world of drugs and sexual hedonism (The Independent).
Millie and her best friend, Jamie, have been through it all together. However, as Jamie begins to settle down with his girlfriend, Millie is lured away from a promising academic career toward a life of numbing drugs and increasingly deviant sexual encounters. Feeling betrayed by one of the few nurturing relationships in her life, Millie’s increasingly reckless behavior leads her to discover her own limitations, as well as the adult complexities of a family she thought she knew.
Portraying a generation of youth—those coming of age in the eighties and nineties—through the prism of Millie, Helen Walsh has created one of the most startling novels to come out of Britain since Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting.
“If you want to find out what is like to be a woman in England today [read] Brass.” —British Vogue
“You’ll be hard-pressed to find a more ballsy, obnoxious, quick-witted, and lusty heroine than . . . Millie. . . . She’s just the kind of character you’ll be drawn to like a magnet.” —Bust
“Walsh’s prose is rhythmic and carefully judged, and her descriptions are convincingly tactile.” —The New Yorker
“A damn good read.” —TimeOut New York
“Millie’s caustic commentary on the electro-charged sexual and intellectual power of post-adolescent women heralds the arrival of a promising new voice from the darker fringes of anti-girlhood.” —Publishers Weekly
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A starred review indicates a book of outstanding quality. A review with a blue-tinted title indicates a book of unusual commercial interest that hasn't received a starred review.BRASSHelen Walsh. Canongate, $18 (296p) Along with recent noteworthy debuts from Bella Bathurst (Special) and Jardine Libaire (Here Kitty Kitty), this novel is part of an emerging subgenre that might be called chick-lit noir. Its antiheroines are motivated if you can call it that by a creeping anomie and low-grade nihilism. If these girls have any ambitions at all, they are emotional abnegation, deranged sexual pleasures and/or chemical obliteration. Walsh's 19-year-old Millie could be the poster child for the subgenre as she bombs around her native Liverpool, lusting after barely adolescent girls and packing her head with booze and blow. Precocious, petulant, middle-class Millie has been "thick as thieves" with a posse of thuggish working-class guys since she was barely a teenager. But her best friend Jamie's increasing commitment to his fianc e has created a "big dilating chasm" between them and has exacerbated Millie's tendency toward self-destructive behavior. Haunted by her perceived loss of Jamie and the painful memory of her estranged mother, "the savage and gradual build-up of filth and deceit" finally catches up with her and sends her spiraling into depravity. Millie's caustic commentary on the electro-charged sexual and intellectual power of postadolescent women heralds the arrival of a promising new voice from the darker fringes of antigirlhood.
