Featured-1800×1200@2x-100-scaled (1)

Reading lists

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

we pretty

Extracts

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

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

A bold, rowdy, and compelling new voice in fiction

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

A gut-punch novel of girlhood in early noughties Yorkshire from a blazing new voice 
 
'It feels essential. You will read nothing else like it this year' GUARDIAN 
 
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 
'Blistering, brilliant, savage and smart' EIMEAR McBRIDE 
'Unforgettable...a wondrous, luminous novel' NANA KWAME ADJEI-BRENYAH 
'Brilliant and original on every level... she is a writer like nobody else' ELIZABETH McCRACKEN

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 ...

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

[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 ...

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

[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 ...

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

Articles featuring Colwill Brown

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

Extract: We Pretty Pieces of Flesh by Colwill Brown

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter