Milk Teeth

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Succulent and Sensual, Jessica Andrews is back once again depicting another turbulent and transitory life of a young 20-something woman. She fluctuates between a frenetic tasting of the world around her and a consequential clenching of the jaw. As Helen Gremillion has noted, anorexia nervosa has ‘been described almost exclusively as a white, middle-class phenomenon’ despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Childhood allies Ira Kamat and Kartik Kini meet on the terrace of their building in Matunga, Mumbai.

Concerned as it is with want and hunger, in all manifestations, each part of this novel represents the whole. In the sticky Mediterranean heat, among tropical plants and secluded beaches, she must decide what form her adult life should take and learn how to feel deserving of love and care.From the author of the award-winning Saltwater comes a beautifully told love story set across England, France and Spain. Rather than just a voyeuristic description of a skipped meal, a pale complexion, or a rogue and jutting collarbone, there’s a liveliness and a reality here that’s explored in the same way it’s lived by its protagonist: overwhelmingly.

I was 18, she 23, a graduate student at Stanford after a year of consulting at BCG and four years of aerospace engineering at IIT Bombay. Years later, living in tiny rented rooms and working in noisy bars across London and Paris, she fights to create her own life. An intimate exploration of class, precarity, sex, power and, above all, of the fragility and exuberance of love. Milk Teeth takes its time to set the context, introducing us to characters in the aforementioned apartment building, their families, their histories and so on and while your interest is always piqued it is not quite clear where the book is headed until a breathless denouement - where it suddenly picks up speed as the traffic clears - which at least I for one didn't see coming. These things follow her into adulthood where her battle to resist the throes of falling in love come up against her need to be whole alone.

Andrews makes the case for a life lived abundantly and ardently, full of sensation and pleasure, risk and safety. As for a new book that I'm excited about, Jessica Andrews' Milk Teeth - her follow-up to award-winning debut novel Saltwater - would have to be it. When I began to read Milk Teeth, I thought I'd be rating it as a pretty meh book, but then within a few pages, I was hooked; I knew it was going to be spectacular.