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Emma Glass’ stunning debut Peach is a violently evocative account of the immediate aftermath of sexual assault. Peach is a teenage girl who negotiates the days following her attack as though in a hallucinatory dream. Glass’ visceral descriptions obscure as much as they elucidate. Peach describes the “thick stick sticky sticking wet ragged wool winding round the wounds, stitching the sliced skin together” as she staggers home to parents who fail to notice that something is desperately wrong. At school, she dodges the questions of her teacher Mr. Custard— who melts into a puddle of custard on the classroom floor– and seeks comfort in the branch-like arms of her boyfriend, Green, a tall and handsome tree. Peach’s descriptions range from the happily humorous— like that of her infant brother, a wobbly Jelly Baby covered in a dusting of sugar, or Green’s best friend Spud, a potato— to the downright disturbing— Peach’s rapist Lincoln, evoked in one of the most sickening portraits I have ever read, leaves a greasy residue and odour of burnt sausage fat wherever he goes.

More than anything, Glass renders with almost painterly skill what it is like to inhabit and experience a traumatised body. Peach can barely eat for the hard pit growing in her stomach, and experiences her surroundings in a kaleidoscopic rush of colours, sounds and smells. Glass’ narrative is like a surrealist painting: pink and red churn nauseatingly across the page while orange splashes upon a craquelure of black dried blood.

Glass’ writing has been compared to Arundhati Roy’s, and her careful manipulation of language makes it is easy to see why. One memorable passage even verges on the Joycean: “Silver silent spectres sail. Silent as they dance, slow and shy […] Shy and silent, but subtly surveying. Seeing everything. Softly sashaying around the room […] Silently soothing me with their slight movements.” Like Ulysses, Glass’ novella might better be categorized as prose poetry, with its embedded rhymes and measured sibilance. Whatever it is, this piece of writing might be devoured in one sitting, but it will worry its way into your brain as the words take root: “In this pit I will sit. In this pit I will sit. In this. In this. Pit.”