We Pretty Pieces of Flesh

English writer Brown wraps an indelible picture of life in South Yorkshire in the aughts around the story of three women’s enduring but fraught friendship. Written in Yorkshire dialect and set in the hardscrabble city of Doncaster, the story begins with Rach and Kel’s first encounter with Shaz when the three are 11. In high school, Shaz has a drunken sexual encounter with two boys, Lanky Lad and Little Un, who swear her to secrecy before she even knows whether she had given consent (much later, she realizes she had been raped). She becomes increasingly troubled over the incident, and develops an eating disorder. After a three-month stay at a rehab clinic, a rift forms between Shaz and the other two that lingers into adulthood. In the present day, when the women are in their 30s, Rach is married to Lanky Lad, Kel is in Boston dealing with a debilitating illness, and Shaz, struggling to find work in Doncaster, debates sharing her long-kept secret with Rach. The narrative is held together by vivid flashbacks to the women’s younger years in the Doncaster rave scene, when they were driven by the “mad ambition to grab oblivion wi both hands and shek it loose,” and Brown keenly explores the limits of the friends’ early bonds. This sharp and tender novel teems with life. (Mar.)