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Debut novels of 2025: discover the year’s breakthrough new voices

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Extract: We Pretty Pieces of Flesh by Colwill Brown

Colwill Brown

[A] lacerating, exhilarating debut novel… It manages to be both boisterous and bleak, life-enhancing and life-denying, familiar and yet wholly original. It feels essential. You will read nothing else like it this year

[A] blistering account of girlhood in deprived 00s Doncaster

Blistering, brilliant, savage and smart. This is a superb debut and Colwill Brown is the real thing

EIMEAR McBRIDE, author of A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing

Tender and raucous, Shaz, Kel, and Rach’s friendship is brilliantly realized. We Pretty Pieces of Flesh is a novel brimming with rough poetry, heart, and mischief

FERDIA LENNON, author of Glorious Exploits

Its gloriously individual voice makes this standout first novel glow with vigor and hope

Dazzling... We don’t know the last book that captured teenage girlhood and female friendship this deftly

With this debut, Colwill Brown announces herself as unforgettable... a wondrous, luminous novel

NANA KWAME ADJEI-BRENYAH, author of Chain-Gang All-Stars

Colwill Brown is, simply, brilliant and original on every level... We Pretty Pieces of Flesh is astonishing, as hilarious and wrenching as life itself

ELIZABETH McCRACKEN, author of The Hero of This Book

A brilliant portrait of female friendship, nearly the equal in honesty and subtlety to Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels

Like the most beguiling fiction about friendship and girlhood, Brown's heartful, humane debut will pull readers in and make them wonder how anyone survives either

So good. Fearlessly authentic, authentically fearless, hilarious, devastating, superbly observed, ingeniously structured... An exceptional piece of work

BEN HINSHAW, author of Exactly What You Mean

One of my standout books of the year. A story about three teenage friends growing up in Doncaster, it captures the raw hilarity, exuberance and heartbreak of being a young woman in the early 2000s

Electrifying… Written in what feels like a new and utterly distinctive female voice, it is very hard to put down

A bold, rowdy, and compelling new voice in fiction

I was hooked from the first line, the evocation of a Northern childhood where you don’t yet know you’re ‘Northern’ and where your hometown is simply ‘town’, not measured against anywhere else. Exactly this. And then the language, so overflowing with energy, so driven and driving, all the rhythms and cadences of Northern speech landing and taking off at once on the page. Like many great first novels, it’s oozing life and dripping with the chaos that birthed it

MARK BOWLES, author of All My Precious Madness

In propulsive, strikingly original prose, Colwill Brown conjures girlhood in all its glittering potential and brutality

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

Colwill Brown is a tremendous writer -- tender and tough, compassionate and sharply funny. We Pretty Pieces of Flesh is extraordinary -- I grew to love Rach, Kel and Shaz as if they were my own childhood friends. A blazingly brilliant novel by a writer who, luckily for us, is just getting started

Colwill Brown's We Pretty Pieces of Flesh is a kinetic and incantatory portrait of the rough-and-tumble world of girlhood. I fell headlong for the tough, vulnerable, and whip-smart characters at the center of this spectacularly original debut

LAURA VAN DEN BERG, author of State of Paradise

Following Kel, Shaz and Rach’s lives from childhood to adulthood is a bit like watching King Lear being acted out every day. The stakes are so high, the passions so deep, the triumphs so vivid but happily, in the face of many missed buses and betrayals, they have each other and another voddie and kebab. We Pretty Pieces of Flesh is one of the most remarkable portraits I’ve ever read of friendship

MARGOT LIVESEY, author of The Road from Belhaven

***Shortlisted for The Goldsmiths Prize 2025*** 
 
'It feels essential. You will read nothing else like it this year' GUARDIAN 
'Blistering, brilliant, savage and smart' EIMEAR McBRIDE 
 
Ask anyone non-Northern, they’ll only know Donny as punch line 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. They share everything, from blagging their way into nightclubs to trips to the Family Planning clinic when they are late. 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 charting a course to uni; or that Kel sometimes feels split in two trying to keep the peace — their friendship is 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. 
 
We Pretty Pieces of Flesh takes you by the hand and leads you through Doncaster’s schoolyards, alleyways and nightclubs, laying bare the intimate treacheries of adolescence and the ways we betray ourselves when we don’t trust our friends. Like The Glorious Heresies and Shuggie Bain, it tracks hard-edged lives and makes them sing, turning one overlooked place into the very centre of the world. 
 
'A novel brimming with rough poetry, heart and mischief' FERDIA LENNON 
'Unforgettable...a wondrous, luminous novel' NANA KWAME ADJEI-BRENYAH 
'Brilliant and original on every level... she is a writer like nobody else' ELIZABETH McCRACKEN

We Pretty Pieces of Flesh

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Colwill Brown

Praise for We Pretty Pieces of Flesh

[A] lacerating, exhilarating debut novel… It manages to be both boisterous and bleak, life-enhancing and life-denying, familiar and yet wholly original. It feels essential. You will read nothing else like ...

[A] blistering account of girlhood in deprived 00s Doncaster

Blistering, brilliant, savage and smart. This is a superb debut and Colwill Brown is the real thing

[A] lacerating, exhilarating debut novel… It manages to be both boisterous and bleak, life-enhancing and life-denying, familiar and yet wholly original. It feels essential. You will read nothing else like ...

[A] blistering account of girlhood in deprived 00s Doncaster

Blistering, brilliant, savage and smart. This is a superb debut and Colwill Brown is the real thing

[A] lacerating, exhilarating debut novel… It manages to be both boisterous and bleak, life-enhancing and life-denying, familiar and yet wholly original. It feels essential. You will read nothing else like ...

[A] blistering account of girlhood in deprived 00s Doncaster

Blistering, brilliant, savage and smart. This is a superb debut and Colwill Brown is the real thing

Articles featuring Colwill Brown

What to read based on your favourite Olivia Rodrigo song

Debut novels of 2025: discover the year’s breakthrough new voices

Extract: We Pretty Pieces of Flesh by Colwill Brown

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