Brass

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