Jessica Andrews | 24th July @7pm

Join us to celebrate the release of Milk Teeth by Jessica Andrews, a lush and intimate love story from the award-winning author of Saltwater.

A girl grows up in the north-east of England amid scarcity, precarity and a toxic culture of bodily shame, certain that she must make herself ever smaller to be loved. Years later, living in tiny rented rooms and working in noisy bars across London and Paris, she fights to create her own life.

She meets someone who cracks her open and offers her a new way to experience the world. But when he invites her to join him in Barcelona, the promise of pleasure and care makes her uneasy. In the shimmering heat of the Mediterranean, she faces the possibility of a different existence, and must choose what to hold on to from her past.

How do we learn to take up space? Why might we deny ourselves good things? Milk Teeth is a story of desire and the body, shame and joy. In vivid and lyrical prose, and with deep compassion, Jessica Andrews examines what it means to allow ourselves to live. 

Jessica's debut novel, Saltwater was published by Sceptre in 2019 and won the Portico Prize in 2020. It explores mother-daughter relationships and shifting class identity in relation to place and the body. Her second novel, Milk Teeth interrogates wanting, denial, food and shame and will be published in July 2022. She writes for the Guardian, the Independent, BBC Radio 4, Stylist and ELLE magazine, among others. She was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction Futures in 2022 and nominated for the ELLE list in 2020. She co-runs literary and arts magazine, The Grapevine and co-presents literary podcast, Tender Buttons. She teaches Creative Writing at Roehampton University.

As always tickets will be free but you can really help out the bookshop by pre-ordering the book here so we know how many to order.

Please note that given the rising rates of Covid in Scotland we ask that attendees perform a lateral flow test before attending and wear a mask throughout the event unless exempt.