A "truly wonderful" exploration of power dynamics between servant and employer is a "slender, beautiful novel with as much heart as a book twice its size." - San Francisco Chronicle
"this is my book and i am writing it by my own hand."
Mary and her three sisters rise every day to farmwork that threatens to suppress their own awakening desires, whether it's Violet's pull toward womanhood or Beatrice's affinity for the Scriptures. But it's their abusive father who stands to deliver the most harm. Only Mary dares to stand up to him. When he sends her to work for the local vicar and his invalid wife, he deals her the only blow she may not survive.
Within walking distance of her family farm, the vicarage is a world away, a curious, unsettling place. Teeming with the sexuality of the vicar's young son and the manipulations of another servant, it is also a place of books and learning-a source of endless joy. Yet as Mary soon discovers, such precious knowledge comes at a devastating price.
"The unflinching, observant, and thoroughly persuasive voice of the narrator, a shrewd, illiterate farm girl, makes this slim novel striking." - The Atlantic
"Compelling . . . [A] literary jewel crafted by an accomplished writer." - Booklist
"At once lyric and brutal." - Library Journal
"Nell Leyshon has beautifully captured a voice that haunts, long after the last word has been read." -Kathleen Grissom, New York Timesbestselling author of The Kitchen House
"A devastating story told with great skill and economy." -Penelope Lively, author of Family Album
"Charming, Brontë-esque, compelling, special and hard to forget." -Marian Keyes, author of Anybody Out There?

Nell Leyshon's first novel, Black Dirt, was longlisted for the Orange Prize and shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize. She is also an award-winning dramatist whose plays include Comfort Me with Apples, winner of an Evening Standard Award, and Bedlam, which was the first play written by a woman for Shakespeare's Globe.

The Colour of Milk is a literary tour de force of power, class, and fate, told in the fierce, urgent voice of the irrepressible Mary, a character as indelible as The Color Purple's Celie and Margaret Atwood's eponymous Alias Grace.

Set in England in 1830, The Colour of Milk by Nell Leyshon is an emotionally haunting work of historical fiction — hailed as "charming, Bront-esque...and hard to forget” (Marian Keyes) — about an illiterate farm girl's emotional and intellectual awakening and its devastating consequences.

Mary, the spirited youngest daughter of an angry, violent man, is sent to work for the local vicar and his invalid wife. Her strange new surroundings offer unsettling challenges, including the vicar's lecherous son and a manipulative fellow servant. But life in the vicarage also offers unexpected joys, as the curious young girl learns to read and write — knowledge that will come at a tragic price.