We Pretty Pieces of Flesh, Colwill Brown
We Pretty Pieces of Flesh, Colwill Brown
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We Pretty Pieces of Flesh
A Novel

Author: Colwill Brown

Narrator: Colwill Brown

Unabridged: 11 hr 9 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 03/18/2025

Synopsis

“A brilliant portrait of female friendship, nearly the equal in honesty and subtlety to Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)An exuberant 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, they’ll only know Donny as punchline of a joke or place they changed trains once ont way to London.” But Doncaster’s also the home of Rach, Shaz, and Kel, bezzies since childhood and Donny lasses through and through. Never mind that Rach is skeptical of Shaz’s 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 peace―the 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 Brown’s debut novel spans decades as its heroines come of age, never shying from the ugly truths of girlhood. Like Trainspotting and Shuggie Bain, We Pretty Pieces of Flesh tracks hard-edged lives and makes them sing, turning one overlooked and forgotten town into the very center of the world.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Emily May on December 23, 2024

This book tore at old wounds. I grew up in "Wakey" Wakefield, not "Donny" Doncaster, which is the setting of We Pretty Pieces of Flesh, but this could easily have been my town, my school, my classmates. The book is written entirely in Yorkshire dialect, which will probably be a challenge for some, bu......more

Goodreads review by Blair on February 21, 2025

The day I started reading We Pretty Pieces of Flesh, I ended up staying up all night to read it, hugely energised by the book, these girls already real to me. I knew straight away this was something very special. Since then, every time I’ve sat down to write about it I’ve baulked at doing so, unsure......more

Goodreads review by Jillian on March 31, 2025

This novel is really more of a collection of interconnected short stories following a trio of best friends as they come of age in working class England in the Y2K era. The stories are laid out non-chronologically and told from different POVs —including more experimental ones like second-person and f......more

Goodreads review by Susan on October 25, 2024

We Pretty Pieces of Flesh is the debut novel of Colwill Brown that follows the coming of age of three young girls as they age into adulthood. It is written in the Yorkshire dialect of Doncaster which was initially tricky for me to find the rhythm but lends realism to the story as does the authors’s......more

Goodreads review by Paul on March 18, 2026

Shortlisted for the 2025 Goldsmiths Prize Shortlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize 2026 Longlisted for the 2025 Gordon Burn Prize You thought about them lasses ont bus, their painted faces and their bad sex facts, trying their hardest to grow intut only version of themsens they thought they......more

Quotes

“With this debut, Colwill Brown announces herself as unforgettable. The music and precision of her language, the fun and fervor of her characters, all of these things make We Pretty Pieces of Flesh a wondrous, luminous novel.” —Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of the National Book Award finalist Chain-Gang All-Stars “Colwill Brown is, simply, brilliant and original on every level; I haven’t read a first book that floored me so thoroughly since Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing. We Pretty Pieces of Flesh is astonishing, as hilarious and wrenching as life itself. Her characters and sentences knock around my brain still, moving, unsettling, indelible. She is a writer like nobody else.” —Elizabeth McCracken, author of The Hero of This Book and the National Book Award Finalist The Giant’s House“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. We Pretty Pieces of Flesh is a rare wonder of a book and Colwill Brown is a writer of astounding originality.” —Edward Carey, author of Edith Holler

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