Flesh of the Peach (2017) revolves around a character who seems both lured and repelled by the sickly scented effects of the strangling past from which she is unable – and unwilling – to escape.

When we meet Sarah Browne, a twenty-seven-year-old British artist of mixed-race descent, she is living in New York and has just lost her job. Her estranged mother, Maud Browne, has recently died of cancer, and, to makes matters worse, Sarah’s love relationship with a married woman has tumultuously ended. Feeling stuck, heartbroken and restless, our protagonist does this very American thing: she leaves everything behind and takes to the road, heading to New Mexico, to spend some time alone and start over.

Her mother had been a successful painter, and Sarah was left with a house in Cornwall, a large inheritance, and a cabin in a remote valley in Santa Fe, where Maud used to retreat to. Upon arriving at her mother’s New Mexico cabin, in the middle of nowhere, Sarah embarks on a doomed affair with Theo Coronado, a young man who lives nearby with his mother.

The book follows Sarah from New York to New Mexico, then Parris, and finally Cornwall. However, our protagonist’s road trip is much more an internal one. Stuck with grief in the middle of an existential crisis, Sarah is forced to face the difficult relationships that had shaped her. The more Sarah strives to move as far away from her past as she can, the closer it gets.

The story is narrated in third person, under Sarah’s perspective, in choppy sentences and short chapters. Mixed with ruminations on Sarah’s present and flashbacks to her childhood, we uncover our protagonist’s troubled past. Raised in a dysfunctional household, by an indifferent mother and an abusive aunt, Sarah never felt as though she belonged. She feels forever stuck “on the threshold, the door never opens, never shuts behind.”

Interspersed with her ruminations, we have mental lists she makes, throughout the book, on how she intends to spend her inheritance: among other strange ideas, she will "build a house out of dogteeth"; buy "huge slabs of carcass from best-beloved cattle", hang them in a cellar, and then “frighten herself with their bodies"; and, most importantly, she will “buy herself a new self".

The highlight of this book for me lies in its tone: it is steeped in anger. Our protagonist is all the time lost in the grey zone between what her childhood could have been and the raw memory of what really was. Sarah is stuck in her anger for her past and her grief for the present. She is constantly on the verge of some form of violence. She is overweening, pretentious, conceited and vain. At the same time, she sees herself as a complete failure, and acts accordingly just to prove her point. She seems indifferent and bored - and cruelty may be the best outlet for her boredom. Sarah’s grief is all-encompassing, and toxic. She barely acknowledges that she is struggling to remain afloat.

The fragmented narration tries to emulate the workings of Sarah’s memory and her disconnection from reality; however, the excessively lyrical writing style has a blurring effect over the narrative, depriving it of its momentum. Sarah’s unravelling feels removed, artificial and anticlimactic: it feels more like a clean, straight line than like a gradual movement. Moreover, we find ourselves so immersed in the protagonist’s self-loathing, that the atmosphere feels just as boring as the protagonist is bored herself.

There is nothing new in the story of a character who seeks loneliness as she tries to reconcile herself with a troubled past. An achievement in narrative voice could have made this novel stand out from the rest in this trope. As it is, though, McClory's book feels overwrought: despite the frequent references to disturbing facts, the atmosphere feels flat, deprived of any sense of unease.

Unlikeable female characters are also easy to be found – look at Eileen, by Ottessa Moshfegh; Novel on Yellow Paper, by Stevie Smith; Good Behaviour, by Molly Keane; Gilgi, by Irmgard Keun; or See What I Have Done, by Sarah Schmidt, to name just a few. Differently, though, Flesh of the Peach falls short from creating a fully fleshed out unlikeable character; and it falls short from creating a powerful narrative voice that connects the reader with a character he truly despises. Sarah just doesn’t inspire any feelings in the reader. She is her grief, and nothing beyond her grief: that leaves no space for further depth or complexity. She is unidimensional, too wordy and removed (and she has no sense of humour) – as if she had been strangled by the somewhat self-conscious, sickly scented writing style.

We are told what Sarah feels, but we cannot feel along with her. And I would have liked to truly despise her; I was prepared to feel utterly disgusted by her. I wanted so much to have felt the glass shards, the taste of salt, sweat and blood. The sharp blade cutting into the flesh of the peach, metal and tenderness. I would have liked to have truly felt.

Helen McClory is a beautiful writer who crafts delicate and powerful sentences. Flesh of the Peach is the story of one woman's journey through grief and anger.

This isn't fluff. This is the real deal.

Thanks to NetGalley, the publisher and Helen McClory for the opportunity to read and review this book.

Flesh of the Peach originally appealed because it was sold very much as a novel with an unlikeable heroine (to the point where this is the focus of the epigraph), and with regard to this, it certainly doesn't disappoint - I found it hard to sympathize or even empathize with Sarah, the main character. That said, it's a beautifully written novel, and reminded me very much of the work of the Australian novelist Emily Maguire..

‘They parted the way lovers should, with a little fine salting of regret, but not too much.’

This novel is dedicated to “all the unlikeable women in fiction and outwith it.” And the star of this novel, twenty-seven-year old Sarah Browne is certainly one of those unlikeable and quirky characters in fiction. At times I warmed to her, at others I felt myself growing distant. As the story opens she has just lost her famous and wealthy artist mother. From England, Sarah is currently in New York, struggling to get over her romance with a married woman. She boards a bus to her mother’s cabin in New Mexico. She doesn’t know what she’s in search of – more love, healing from the past and the brittle relationship she had with her mother, healing from this woman she’s just parted from. Across the landscape of the Americas and finally in New Mexico, her inner journey continues. The writing is lyrical and beautiful, but Sarah remains a difficult heroine to understand, despite the author’s descriptions: ‘She had wanted warmth and to be harmed. To feel beloved and stung. She had wanted to blister from love, not to have to flee.’

But she flees, and in the New Mexico wilderness she encounters others who knew her mother, and a man, with whom she becomes intimate. All through the novel, memories of the past, growing up with her mother, her aunt and her cousin, wash through the present. This is a story about grief, about confronting the past, and holding onto the present in order to do that. This is a story about the rivers of time, and how we have to step in those waters in order to understand and reach the other side.

‘I’m not even a person,’ Sarah said quietly.
‘Maybe not,’ Theo said, ‘grief does that.’

I really do not know what to say about this book. It was very difficult to get through for me. It is about a women who is estranged from her mother who dies around the same time her married girlfriend breaks up with her. This sends her into a downward spiral of depression, self mutilation, and violence. However, her mother left her a large fortune so she leaves New York and goes to New Mexico on a Greyhound bus. Once there things really get weird when she meets Theodore. The upside to this book is its unpredictability but for me it was way to wordy and somewhat unrealistic.


























her mother

I absolutely adored this book., I read it in a single sitting and loved the style of narration. I can see this being a runaway success. Helen McClory is a talented and provocative writer who asks us to follow Sarah's journey of turbulence anger and despair as art. Her language is just beautiful and several passages required a re-reading to fully appreciate her craft. I will be giving this book to several of my artist friends as I loved it so much. A five star read.

Despite the influx of books, I haven’t read much this week. But I did finish The Beautiful Bureaucrat by Helen Phillips: a short fabulist novel that takes the mundane reality of being a twenty-something pencil pusher in a post-crash economy and turns it into an eerie, unpredictable parallel reality with an element of playing God. I didn’t love reading it at first but it kept compelling me to continue until its absolutely brilliant ending. I can’t remember the last time I celebrated a novel for its ending.

Last week I also read and took a moment to digest Flesh of the Peach by Helen McClory. It’s filled with another form of twenty-something struggle within a character who doesn’t realise how fucked up she is and whose meandering takes her to unexpected places. I found it wonderful on the sentence level, with observations and descriptions that are just so. Sometimes surprising, other times like you’d already thought of them, there’s some kind of satisfying alchemy that makes them slot into your brain and reside there, like you’re better off for having read them. Also, the characters are constantly drinking tea, which is very much my sensibility. It’s out from Freight Books on 20 April.

What’s on your nightstand?

This is just brilliant and beautiful. McClory's sentence-level writing is just masterful, but never at the expense of the overall story and characterization. Loved this.

A really enjoyable read!
Absolutely beautiful writing, wonderful storytelling and fantastic character work.
The chapter lengths really worked for me. Sometimes you only have 5 minutes free to read and this book enabled me to me able to have a read without being halfway through a page before having to leave it.
I will be recommending this to my bookish friends!