Brass

Nineteen-year-old Millie O'Reilly is clever, spiky and adored by men yet utterly forlorn. Increasingly disillusioned, she seeks an escape in the underbelly of Liverpool . . . Shockingly candid and brutally poetic, Helen Walsh has created a portrait of a city and a generation that offers a female perspective on the harsh truth of growing up in today's Britain. Brass is an unsettling but ultimately compassionate account of the possibilities of identity and the desirability of love. Disillusioned with academic life, 19-year-old Millie seeks escape in the underbelly of Liverpool's Cathedral area, where an encounter with a world-weary prostitute turns into a nocturnal odyssey of drink-fuelled self-abuse, leaving Millie questioning who she is and what she wants to get out of life. We turn onto Upper Duke Street and the view sucks the breath from my lungs.