'Grunginess' is nearer the mark' Adam Lively, Sunday Times 'The cause of the fuss is the novel's extreme obscenity - though 'obscenity' doesn't quite catch the particular, pungent flavour of the thing. ''Wetlands', in the tradition of Plath's 'The Bell Jar', is a remarkable novel about mental illness that has been mistaken for feminist literature' Alice O'Keefe, New Statesman Boldly, Roche takes them for her own' Guardian Every writer needs to claim a bit of territory, and assholes are there for the grabbing. 'If you ever wondered what you'd be like if you weren't shy, polite, tolerant, modest, sexually repressed, logical and constrained by modern standards of hygiene, this may be the book for you.This is not a beautiful or perfect book, but an enterprising one, and its cumulative effect is admirable.Our bodies mean a lot to us - even the asshole, about which far too little has been written. 'Profoundly unsettling' Rowan Pelling, Daily Mail Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers ISBN: 9780007307616 Number of pages: 225 Weight: 180 g Dimensions: 198 x 129 x 16 mm MEDIA REVIEWS Clearly the novel has struck a nerve, catching a wave of popular interest in renewing the debate over women's roles and image in society. It gives a detailed topography of Helen's hemorrhoids, continues into the subject of anal intercourse and only gains momentum from there, eventually reaching avocado pits as objects of female sexual satisfaction and - here is where the debate kicks in - just possibly female empowerment. Wetlands opens in a hospital room after an intimate shaving accident. It is difficult to overstate the raunchiness of the novel. The book is a headlong dash through every crevice and byproduct, physical and psychological, of its narrator's body and mind.

Since its debut in February, the novel ('Feuchtgebiete', in German) has sold more than 680,000 copies, and is the biggest selling book on Amazon anywhere in the world. With her jaunty dissection of the sex life and the private grooming habits of the novel's 18-year-old narrator, Helen Memel, Charlotte Roche has turned the previously unspeakable into the national conversation in Germany.

Wetlands by charlotte roche ebook