Peach

By Emma Glass

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SELECTED BY THE INDEPENDENT AND THE OBSERVER AS A BOOK OF THE YEAR 2018
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'An immensely talented young writer ... Her fearlessness renews one's faith in the power of literature ' - George Saunders, winner of the 2017 Man Booker Prize

'Poetic' - Independent

'The language is scintillating, the emotional heft remarkable' - Observer

'Daring' - Sunday Times

'Ferocious, startling, all-consuming' - Daisy Johnson, author of Fen
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Peach is a teenage girl like any other. She has college, and her friends, and her parents and the new baby, and her gorgeous boyfriend Green. She has her friend Sandy, and Sid the cat, and homework to do.

But something has happened – something unspeakable – and her world has become unfamiliar, fractured into strange textures and patterns. Reeling through her refracted universe, Peach knows that the people she loves are in danger, real danger. If she is not to be swallowed whole, Peach must summon all her courage and dig deep into something nameless and strange that lies within her.
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'Powerfully felt, sinister, vivid' - Literary Review
'This is a book to be devoured in a single sitting. Glass is an exciting new author to know' - Vogue
'An impressive achievement' - Big Issue

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Jan 11, 2018
• ISBN: 9781408886670

Emma Glass

Emma Glass was born in Wales in 1987 and is now based in London, where she writes and works as a children's nurse. Her debut novel Peach was published by Bloomsbury in 2018, has been translated into seven languages and was long-listed for the International Dylan Thomas Prize. Her second novel Rest and Be Thankful will be published by Bloomsbury in 2020. @Emmas_Window

Reviews for Peach

[pivic-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Reading this book reminds me of the first time I tried using Braille, and I have no visual impairment: to me, reading the bumps with my fingers made me feel as though there was (naturally) something behind it, a veil that subsumed a world of depth.

This is Emma Glass's first book, and it doesn't feel like it. The language reminds me somehow of reading José Saramago, where it kind of unfurls, yet I don't have to construe it; it's stream-of-consciousness while not being too obvious, even though this is a moralistic tale.

Language is all, and for a first-time writer, I think it's very safe to say that writing a book like this is throwing yourself into the unknown even more than otherwise. Here's a paragraph for ya:

Against the black of my eyelids I see nothing but shadows swimming towards me, swimming away. The slit splits further across my belly. I feel the flesh fall. I fall with it. My legs are eroding. Suddenly I am flushed with fear. I can’t cry, my face is melting. My lips open, my eyes won’t open. The blessing will be that I can’t see the bottom. What have I learned who have I hurt is this it. Nothing but flesh. Was this all for nothing other than the craving of fresh flesh. Senseless flesh. I am nothing but solid stone, alone, sinking, how can I still think when my face is all gone. What will they find at the bottom, will they know I was here because I carved you into my heart and I think this heavy rock, this stone, this seed will still have the shape of you inside, look closely at the cracks, slide into the crevices, you will see. I can’t I can’t I won’t grow in this stagnant pond, this soiled water, this stinking pit, this is it, I can’t I won’t grow, I can’t hold I can’t hold I feel I am close I feel the scratch and scrape the stone on the ceramic tiles the stone the stone the stone on stone, I can’t grow I won’t hold I can’t hold. I can’t grow. I can’t hold any soul. In this pit I will sit. In this pit I will sit. In this. In this. Pit.

Throughout the book, I got the feeling that threat looms in the background, but really it's in the foreground, due to the nature of Glass's language, much like seeing waves crashing without sound in the middle of the night: you know it's there, but it's not entirely evident. I shan't spoil any surprises, but there's more to the book than what I've written of here.

[cathgilmore · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Peach is high intensity fiction, opening with an explosion of visceral, unremitting fear and pain as a young woman tries to pull herself together after being raped. Everything is relayed from a sensory level, from the odor of the man to the wool fibers of her mittens against her chin to the scalding hot water she stands in after she staggers home and into the shower. It is unremitting and author Emma Glass doesn’t let up for the rest of the novel, making for a book that repulsed me even as I was trying to make sense of it.Peach is the girl’s name and for every minute after she’s raped until the novel’s end she vomits every thought onto the page. Only they’re not quite thoughts—at least not in a cohesive way. Instead, they are visual and highly exaggerated—she licks her baby brother because he is covered in powdered sugar, even though it’s really baby powder. Her parents are highly sexualized and tell her they wish she would hurry up and get pregnant so her little brother would have a playmate near his age even though she’s not even in college yet. And then there’s the rapist, who is overpoweringly described repeatedly in terms of meat and its horrible greasiness and rancid smell. Peach is a vegetarian so this metaphor makes sense, but when added onto the already unrelenting tide of Peach’s impressions of the world it is too much. As is the violence Peach perpetrates against herself.By the time I finished Peach I was not only mentally exhausted I was not sure what I had read. Was it a novel about the hyper-realism or surrealism left behind after sexual assault? Was it in some way about the violence against animals by meat-eaters? While I give Glass credit for extraordinary creativity in her choice of writing style the end result did not hold together. The style took precedence over the words’ meaning, with form trampling function.If Peach is meant to depict what happens when the fragile barrier between sanity and a mental break occurs, due to extreme trauma, then Glass succeeds. But doing so without any other quieter, rational narrative to balance the deeply disturbing cacophony from inside Peach’s mind, leaves the reader with nothing to hold onto, nothing to provide the mental state to assess what is happening and so, retreat is all that’s left. Peach isn’t a badly written novel, but it feels as if Glass has won a battle but lost the war. Or, in this case, the reader.

[chrisblocker · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Ah, sweet, sweet, sweet Peach. So short. So sweet. So blunted. So cloying. Maybe it's an acquired taste.Emma Glass's very original novella Peach is truly unlike anything I've read before. On one hand, it is rich, full of alliteration and word play. The use of language is done with great skill. This is a very poetic story, but unlike some other works of “prose” I've read that felt more like poetry than prose, Peach is merely a very poetic story. From the publisher's description and the opening pages, I expected something along these lines. What I did not expect was the intense surrealism and the black comedy. This is a strange book with some very uncomfortable moments. At times I think it works. At other times, I'm not convinced.One thing that was very difficult for me to accept was the depiction of characters as objects. Most of these characters are foods including a man made of sausage. Mr. Custard, for instance, truly takes the shape of custard: he is a gelatinous mass of sweetness who must pick himself up from the floor occasionally and take shape. Spud is a giant potato who rolls everywhere. Peach, Sandy, Spud, Mr. Custard, Hair Netty, Green... At first I imagined these characters as Glass described them, but eventually, they took a new shape. I couldn't help but think of Mr. Men and Little Miss and once the image was in my head, there was no replacing it. So imagine Mr. Bump and Little Miss Star, driving around in Murakami-inspired cars with sushi rolls for wheels. That is how I will remember Peach.Peach is also disturbing. Imagine Mr. Tickle and Little Miss Contrary slashing at one another, trouncing one another, devouring one another in all its visceral cartoonishness. Which leaves me with some questions. Is the surrealist style meant to soften the blow of the violence? Does this ridiculous presentation dull too much the impact of serious subjects? Peach is an uncomfortable story, but how much more uncomfortable could it have been had Glass refrained from her otherwise Saturday morning vibe? It's this presentation that ultimately makes Peach forgettable, a story beautifully rendered, but void of so much potential anguish.

[slugman-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A visceral concept well realised. But the writing is a touch heavy-handed in my opinion.