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Shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Encore Award 2023
A girl grows up in the north-east of England amid scarcity, fearing her own desires and feeling undeserving of love.
Years later, living in tiny rented rooms and working in noisy bars across London and Paris, she meets someone who offers her a new way to experience the world.
But when he invites her to join him in Barcelona, the promise of care makes her uneasy. In the shimmering Mediterranean heat, she is faced with both pleasure and shame, and must find out if she is able to change.
*
Jessica Andrews’s first novel, Saltwater, was wonderful. The follow-up, Milk Teeth, is even better.
Guardian
Sensual and wryly perceptive, the acclaimed author of Saltwater delivers a deftly wrought and emotionally devastating account of a life lived in the shadows and a potential salvation in the Mediterranean sun.
Waterstones
Heady, sweaty, sexy, salient. I devoured it.
Abigail Tarttelin
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
Like many girls from my generation, raised on a diet of Arturo Bandini's oranges and shiny tinned dreams of post-feminism, I have wasted too many years trying to fit into small, muted spaces. I would rather sit down to eat and think with Jessica Andrews any day: 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 Rodrigues Fowler
In lyric dispatches, with the condensed cadences of poetry, Andrews’ novel brilliantly explores the ways we grow into and beyond the limits of ourselves, and what happens in the gaps in between who we are and who we’re expected to be.
Andrew McMillan
Milk Teeth is electrifying. It’s an exothermic novel that breathes, seethes and writhes. An intimate exploration of class, precarity, sex, power, and above all of the fragility and exuberance of love. The prose is vivid, gorgeous and supple. It’s immediate and ultra-sensual, and has the emotional pitch and intensity of the best gig you’ve ever been to. A thunderbolt of a book.
Francesca Reece
A sharp and beguiling love story . . . languid, elegantly written and dripping with a rich emotional humidity . . . Milk Teeth is a transporting, gorgeous novel
Independent
A tide of sharply sensuous detail keeps the reader riveted as the book flows by in a series of candidly recounted episodes sustained by voice rather than plot. Andrews takes aim at the cultural pressures shaping unhealthy ideals of femininity without ever seeming to preach.
Daily Mail
A transporting, visceral second novel... a sizzling novel to read in the heat, when you're hungry for life.
Lucy Writers Platform
An intimate love story . . . Lazy comparisons to Sally Rooney don't do Andrews' unique writing style justice. Milk Teeth is a must-read.
Reaction.Life
Andrews' prose is distinctly stylised. It possesses a heightened sensuality which reflects the protagonist's aspiration to live fiercely, "like lightning" - free of restraint . . . Milk Teeth possesses a highly charged and often deliberately uncomfortable intimacy.
Michael Donkor, i
Andrews's sentences are like plum puddings. Rich. Satisfying. And she often uses verbs - spill, split, bleed, leaks - that suggest a messy life. Our heroine does have a messy life - don't we all - but it's presented here in a way that sees truth pouring off every page.
The Crack
Lyrical prose, sticky Mediterranean heat and vivid descriptions make this coming-of-age story transporting, sensual and completely addictive. Themes of loneliness, belonging, identity and love - and how we're ultimately deserving of it - will both break and warm your heart. A must for fans of Sally Rooney.
Best Holiday Reads by Roxy Kavousi-Walker, Net-a-Porter
Astute, gut-wrenching...For a novel that is so sharp and often written with such linguistic utility, it isn't at all sparse. Despite these moments in which the narration is given the control that the narrator so desires, this novel is full. In fact, fittingly, one might say it has real weight.
Lunate
I liked it very much . . . the language, the prose, is very rich . . . there was a melody to it, I found myself reading passages aloud as if there was a poetry to it.
Agnès Poirier, BBC Radio 4 Front Row
Across its blissfully sprawling passages detailing scenes from different cities, what anchors the novel is its exploration of how hunger, class, desire and gender are interlaced . . . In Saltwater Andrews sought a voice that is her own, something she has truly settled into in Milk Teeth. Addressed in second person to the narrator's lover, the writing is gilded with a vulnerable immediacy, blisteringly honest and visceral. Andrews, already lauded, has come into her own.
Miriam Balanescu, Irish Times
There aren't many high-quality novels for adults that pay serious attention to eating disorders . . . so it's good to find Andrews writing with such precision . . . Andrews's writing style is sensual . . . consuming and sexy.
Susie Goldsbrough, The Times
This confidence in her material - in placing centre stage a young, unnamed northern woman living a precarious existence but struggling to carve out more space for herself - makes her work reminiscent of Gwendoline Riley . . . unusually raw . . . so honest and hopeful.
Alex Peake-Tomkinson, Financial Times