Published in 2023
304 pages
Dizz Tate is a writer currently living in London, after growing up in Florida. She was long-listed for Young Poet Laureate for London in 2014. She has been previously published in The Wrong Quarterly, Squawk Back, and with Arachne Press, with work forthcoming in Femmeuary. She has written a short play as part of the London Design Festival, and took part in the Young Writers Workshop at the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith in 2014. In 2015, she was long-listed for the Bare Fiction Prize and Bristol Short Story Prize.
What is this book about?
The Virgin Suicides meets The Florida Project in this wildly original debut—a coming-of-age story about the crucible of girlhood, from a writer of rare and startling talent
We would not be born out of sweetness, we were born out of rage, we felt it in our bones.
In Falls Landing, Florida—a place built of theme parks, swampy lakes, and scorched bougainvillea flowers—something sinister lurks in the deep. A gang of thirteen-year-old girls obsessively orbit around the local preacher’s daughter, Sammy. She is mesmerizing, older, and in love with Eddie. But suddenly, Sammy goes missing. Where is she? Watching from a distance, they edge ever closer to discovering a dark secret about their fame-hungry town and the cruel cost of a ticket out. What they see will continue to haunt them for the rest of their lives.
Through a darkly beautiful and brutally compelling lens, Dizz Tate captures the violence, horrors, and manic joys of girlhood. Brutes is a novel about the seemingly unbreakable bonds in the “we” of young friendship, and the moment it is broken forever.
