Description
About Jessica Andrews
Jessica Andrews grew up in Sunderland. She writes for the Guardian, the Independent, BBC Radio 4, Stylist and ELLE magazine, among others. Her debut novel, Saltwater won the Portico Prize in 2020. She co-runs The Grapevine, a magazine which aims to give a platform to under-represented writers and co-presents the literary podcast Tender Buttons. She lives in Bristol and teaches Creative Writing at Roehampton University.
Photo © Seth Hamilton
About Milk Teeth
A young woman struggles against a toxic culture of body shame and questions if she’s worthy of love, as she travels between the north-east of England, Paris and Barcelona.
Through Jessica Andrews’ vivid and lyrical prose, we embark on a tender, painful exploration of what it means to understand ourselves and the things we truly want in life.
Growing up in the north of England amid scarcity, precarity and the toxic culture of heroin chic, the heroine of Milk Teeth believes she needs to make herself smaller to claim presence in the world. Years later she meets someone who calls everything into question and she is forced to confront episodes from her past. Their relationship takes her from London to Barcelona and the precipice of a new life. In the sticky Mediterranean heat, among tropical plants and secluded beaches, she must decide what form her adult life should be and learn how to take the things she wants.
‘Addictive, immediate, brilliant. Jessica Andrews offers a profound take on the ways our bodies are policed, on class, escapism and losing yourself in others’ HELEN MORT
‘Heady, sweaty, sexy, salient. I devoured it’ ABIGAIL TARTTELIN
‘Milk Teeth is a novel about holding space, and the hard work that it takes. It is true and I am so grateful it exists. What a relief it is, finally, to step off the ledge: to choose to adventure, to give and take care.’ LIVIA FRANCHINI
‘Milk Teeth spills over with care, truth and desire. Andrews makes the case for a life lived abundantly and ardently, full of sensation and pleasure, risk and safety.’ YARA RODRIGES FOWLER
About Samantha Walton
Samantha Walton is a writer, researcher and editor based in Bristol. Her most recent book, Everybody Needs Beauty: In Search of the Nature Cure (Bloomsbury) is a work of nature writing and cultural history which explores the nature-wellbeing connection in the context of ecological crisis and late capitalism. Her poetry includes Self Heal (Boiler House Press), a collection of ecological lyrics, and Bad Moon (Spam Press), an ecogothic feminist horror story about the end of the world. She co-edits Sad Press and is Reader in Modern Literature at Bath Spa University.
