Jessica Andrews’ debut novel Saltwater (2019) told the story of a young working-class woman from Sunderland making her way in London. Although her second novel, Milk Teeth, flits between Paris, Barcelona and rural Spain, as well as London and north-east England, it essentially returns to the same territory as her first.
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, with a hopeful vulnerability in place of Riley’s occasionally caustic edge.
The protagonist dances between vulnerability and assertion as she attempts to grapple with her desire to maltreat her own body In fact, the sincerity of Andrews’ writing is so unusually raw that at first it can seem embarrassing.
