Not since Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting has an ambitious first novel created such a stir among readers of important new voices in fiction. Since its release in the United Kingdom, Brass has sent shock waves through literary circles for its raw, unrelenting, poetic, and utterly compelling portrait of Millie, a promising college kid drifting into a deceptively inviting world of street culture, drug-induced adorations, and sexual hedonism.
Helen Walsh, at the age of twenty-seven, 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 what was 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, just as she discovers her own limitations and the more penetrating complexities of a family she thought she knew.