The Brutal Language Of Love

'Beatrice told Shipley she would sleep with him, and then she passed out. When she awoke the next morning, he said he'd gone ahead without her.'

Alicia Erian's deliciously grown-up debut may not be a book for nice girls, but it has a lot to teach us about the unruly nature of desire. A teenage spelling champion has an affair with the classroom bully. Her memories of their illicit afternoons in his bathtub - a place where she discovers an assurance that has elsewhere eluded her - are some of the fondest of a troubled adolescence. For it is here she finds a freedom as exhilarating as it can be painful.

In 'The Brutal Language Of Love' Alicia Erian offers us an unblinkingly candid look at relationships in some of their less conventional guises: a college-bound student farcically desperate to be deflowered by a pizza waiter; a woman convinced by a bra-shopping trip that she is a lesbian; and an American who marries the son of an Irish novelist (whose work she cannot bring her self to read), only to find unexpected feelings stirring for the father.

Bold, achingly funny but full of real intimacy and tenderness, this is a book about the unruly nature of desire - and women who dare to grasp at experience in the knowledge that they may live to regret it. It announces the debut of a true and highly original voice in American fiction.