Milk Teeth
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
'Jessica Andrews's first novel, Saltwater, was wonderful. The follow-up, Milk Teeth, is even better' Alex Preston, 'Fiction To Look Out For In 2022', The Guardian
From the author of the award-winning Saltwater comes a beautifully told love story set across England, France and Spain.
A girl grows up in the north of England amid scarcity, precarity and the toxic culture of heroin chic, believing that she needs to make herself smaller to claim presence in the world.
Years later, as a young woman with unattainable ideals, she meets someone who calls everything into question, and is forced to confront episodes from her past. Their relationship takes her from London to Barcelona and the precipice of a new life, full of sensuality. Yet she still feels an uneasiness. In the sticky Mediterranean heat, among tropical plants and secluded beaches, she must decide what form her adult life should take and learn how to feel deserving of love and care.
'Gorgeous . . . Andrews's writing is transportingly voluptuous, conjuring tastes and smells and sounds like her literary godmother, Edna O'Brien.' New York Times on Saltwater
(P) 2022 Hodder & Stoughton Limited
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.
