Brass - Softcover

Walsh, Helen

3.39

890 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1841954845 ISBN 13: 9781841954844

Publisher: Canongate U.S., 2004

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Upon its release in the United Kingdom, British Vogue said if you want to find out what it is like to be a woman in England today [read] Brass.” Literary circles, critics, students, and readers of all stripes are talking about Brass for its raw, unrelenting, yet compassionate and utterly compelling portrait of Millie, a promising college kid drifting into a deceptively inviting world of rough hewn street culture, drug-induced adorations, and sexual hedonism.

Helen Walsh, at the age of 27, has produced a staggeringly alive debut novel that portrays a generation of youth those coming of age in the 80s and 90s through the prism of Millie. Millie and her best friend Jamie have been through it all together. However, as Millie is lured away from a promising academic career toward a life of numbing drugs and increasingly deviant sexual encounters, Jamie is finally settling down with his girlfriend. Millie feels betrayed by one of the few authentic and nurturing relationships in her life at a pivotal time of self-revelation.

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From the Back Cover:

"The most striking coming-of-age story that I have read for a long time . . . Helen Walsh is up there with Irvine Welsh in her ability to show what it is that draws people to the extremes of pleasure." Natasha Walter, Vogue

Nineteen-year-old Millie O'Reilly is clever, spiky and adored by men, but feels increasingly trapped. She seeks escape in the hedonistic underbelly of Liverpool, getting off on rough sex and cheap highs.

Shockingly candid and brutally poetic, Helen Walsh has created a portrait both of a city and a generation, offering a female perspective on the harsh truth of growing up in today's Britain.

"A novel whose imagery you won't easily scrub off the back of your mind. It is spellbinding and utterly unique." Independent
"An incredibly uplifting experience . . . You wouldn't say the future of mainstream fiction was exactly safe in her hands, but it'll certainly be more adult, more comic, more eventful." Guardian
"Walsh has a gift for creating character through voice . . . To use an image that both protagonist and author would enjoy, these are the budding breasts of a voluptuous talent." The Times
"Something of ferocious power . . . Helen Walsh is not going to be a major and interesting new voice; she already is one." Niall Griffiths

About the Author:

HELEN WALSH was born in Warrington in 1977 and moved to Barcelona at the age of sixteen. Working as a fixer in the red light district, she saved enough money to put herself through language school. Burnt out and broke, she returned to England a year later and now works with socially excluded teenagers in North Liverpool. Brass is her first novel.

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