We Pretty Pieces of Flesh - Hardcover

by Colwill Brown (Author)

Shortlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
Longlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel

"This lacerating, exhilarating debut novel . . . manages to be both boisterous and bleak, life-enhancing and life-denying, familiar and yet wholly original. It feels essential. You will probably read nothing else like it this year."
--The Guardian

"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.

Author Biography

Colwill Brown was born and raised in Doncaster, South Yorkshire. Winner of the 2025 BBC National Short Story Award, she holds an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin, where she received a James A. Michener Fellowship, and an MA in English literature from Boston College. Her work has received scholarships and awards from the Tin House Summer Workshop, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Hedgebrook, Ragdale, the Anderson Center, GrubStreet Center for Creative Writing, and elsewhere. For sixteen years she's lived with ME/CFS, a debilitating neurological disease triggered by a virus that, due to systemic medical neglect, currently has no treatment. A proud Donny lass, she claims to have played bass guitar in (nearly) every rock venue on South Yorkshire's toilet circuit.