Brass by Helen Walsh

Sex and the city of Liverpool

"The whole of the city is aglow," begins the 20-year-old heroine of this startling first novel, as she leads a teenaged prostitute to a wretched encounter on a gravestone beneath a cathedral. "The Liver buildings, brightly drenched by the rising moon, reign magnificently in a cloudless sky." This is a novel about Millie, her friend Jamie, sex, drugs, love, self-destruction and the city of Liverpool, which towers over the story as the Anglican cathedral looms above the city, serving as "a beacon for whores and their punters". Liverpool is as vital to Brass as Edinburgh is to Trainspotting.

Its history as a trading port has bequeathed Liverpudlians an eclectic dialect more associated with Beat poets and Seventies comedians than streetwise novelists, but the Scouse way with language saturates Helen Walsh's prose - a joyful, poetic, filthy phonetic transcription that borrows the juiciest tricks from Lancashire, Irish, Welsh, Jamaican, Spanish and Italian. A scouser, like Jamie, whose narrative voice alternates with Millie's, will never use a whole word while "mobile phone" can be reduced to "mobie". Nor will he be satisfied with straight talking if he can elaborate. Thus thing turns into "thing'o", and "these kecks" are "pure fucken class". Millie's mouth "feels like a chewed moth". The reader ends up chewing on words like treacle.

Walsh has been called the Scouse Irvine Welsh, and the comparison is not surprising. Both sometimes write phonetically, using dialect. Both discuss drug-taking and sex without reservation; Walsh's drug scenes sweep the reader along on a wave of "beak", whiskey and spliff until we are so knocked out by her manic, prose that we find ourselves brought up sharp against horrors. Like her Scottish predecessor, Walsh is not afraid of grossing the reader out.

Millie's journey is not one for weak stomachs. In a process of self-destruction, she alienates herself from her best friend as she drinks, smokes, snorts and fucks herself one step ahead of her demons. With her frightening capacity for narcotics and trouble, Millie is hard to like, but impossible not to love. In Brass, Walsh has created some of literature's sexiest sex scenes, most out-of-it drug-taking and a dark, cynical worldview. But her ultimate offering of love and redemption is something else. Brass is a novel whose imagery you won't easily scrub off the back of your mind. It is spellbinding and utterly unique.