Brown Girls

Daphne Palasi Andreades

Fourth Estate

£12.99

The titular young women hail from Queens, New York, and are not simply one shade of brown but the ‘colour of grilled hamburger patties… colour of peanut butter’. Andreades writes engagingly about the conflict between the girls’ immigrant backgrounds and the American culture they seek to embrace, but for all the energy and sensitivity of its prose, this debut novel is largely plotless.