An Instant New York Times Bestseller \nA New York Times Notable Book \nOne of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2020\nNamed One of the Best Books of the Year by: The Washington Post, NPR, Shelf Awareness, Esquire, Electric Literature, Slate, The Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and InStyle\nA chillingly personal and exquisitely wrought memoir of a daughter reckoning with the brutal murder of her mother at the hands of her former stepfather, and the moving, intimate story of a poet coming into her own in the wake of a tragedyAt age nineteen, Natasha Trethewey had her world turned upside down when her former stepfather shot and killed her mother. Grieving and still new to adulthood, she confronted the twin pulls of life and death in the aftermath of unimaginable trauma and now explores the way this experience lastingly shaped the artist she became.\nWith penetrating insight and a searing voice that moves from the wrenching to the elegiac, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Natasha Trethewey explores this profound experience of pain, loss, and grief as an entry point into understanding the tragic course of her mother’s life and the way her own life has been shaped by a legacy of fierce love and resilience. Moving through her mother’s history in the deeply segregated South and through her own girlhood as a “child of miscegenation” in Mississippi, Trethewey plumbs her sense of dislocation and displacement in the lead-up to the harrowing crime that took place on Memorial Drive in Atlanta in 1985.\\nMemorial Drive is a compelling and searching look at a shared human experience of sudden loss and absence but also a piercing glimpse at the enduring ripple effects of white racism and domestic abuse. Animated by unforgettable prose and inflected by a poet’s attention to language, this is a luminous, urgent, and visceral memoir from one of our most important contemporary writers and thinkers.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICKIn this beautiful and moving novel about family, love, and growing up, Ann Patchett once again proves herself one of America’s finest writers.“Patchett leads us to a truth that feels like life rather than literature.” —The GuardianIn the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart. As in all of her novels, Ann Patchett combines compelling narrative artistry with piercing insights into family dynamics. The result is a rich and luminous story, told with profound intelligence and emotional subtlety, that demonstrates once again why she is one of the most revered and acclaimed literary talents working today.

A provocative novel about the desire and duty to procreate, from the author of the critically acclaimed How Should A Person Be?\\nMotherhood treats one of the most consequential decisions of early adulthood – whether or not to have children – with the intelligence, wit and originality that have won Sheila Heti international acclaim.\\nHaving reached an age when most of her peers are asking themselves when they will become mothers, Heti’s narrator considers, with the same urgency, whether she will do so at all. Over the course of several years, under the influence of her partner, body, family, friends, mysticism and chance, she struggles to make a moral and meaningful choice.\\nIn a compellingly direct mode that straddles the forms of the novel and the essay, Motherhood raises radical and essential questions about womanhood, parenthood, and how – and for whom – to live.

“A vibrant and moving debut that takes to heart our deferred dreams and the value of remaining hopeful.”—Diane Marie Brown, author of Black Candle WomenHow much of their lineage is one family willing to unearth in order to participate in the nation’s first federal reparations program?Every American waits with bated breath to see whether or not the country’s first female president will pass the Forgiveness Act. The bill would allow Black families to claim up to $175,000 if they can prove they are the descendants of slaves, and for ambitious single mother Willie Revel the bill could be a long-awaited form of redemption. A decade ago, Willie gave up her burgeoning journalism career to help run her father’s struggling construction company in Philadelphia and she has reluctantly put family first, without being able to forget who she might have become. Now she’s back living with her parents and her young daughter while trying to keep her family from going into bankruptcy. Could the Forgiveness Act uncover her forgotten roots while also helping save their beloved home and her father’s life’s work?In order to qualify, she must first prove that the Revels are descended from slaves, but the rest of the family isn’t as eager to dig up the past. Her mother is adopted, her father doesn’t trust the government and believes working with a morally corrupt employer is the better way to save their business, and her daughter is just trying to make it through the fifth grade at her elite private school without attracting unwanted attention. It’s up to Willie to verify their ancestry and save her family—but as she delves into their history, Willie begins to learn just how complicated family and forgiveness can be.With powerful insight and moving prose, Acts of Forgiveness asks how history shapes who we become and considers the weight of success when it is achieved despite incredible odds—and ultimately what leaving behind a legacy truly means.

'as Informative As It Is Poetic' Dolly Alderton 'compassionate, Funny And Beautifully Written' Daisy Buchanan ------------------------------ Every Woman Will Experience The Panic Years In Some Way Between Her Mid-twenties And Early-forties. This Maddening Period Of Transformation And Personal Crisis Is Recognisable By The Myriad Of Decisions We Make - About Partners, Holidays, Jobs, Homes, Savings, Friendships - All Of Which Are Impacted By The Urgency Of The Single Decision That Comes With A Biological Deadline, The One Decision That Is Impossible To Take Back; Whether Or Not To Have A Baby. But How To Stay Sane In Such A Maddening Time? How To Know Who You Are And What You Might Want From Life? How To Know If You're Making The Right Decisions? Raw, Hilarious And Beguilingly Honest, Nell Frizzell's Account Of Her Panic Years Is Both An Arm Around The Shoulder And A Campaign To Start A Conversation. This Affects Us All - Women, Men, Mothers, Children, Partners, Friends, Colleagues - So It's Time We Started Talking About It With A Little More Candour. What Readers Are Saying - 'loved This Book! Highly Recommend For Any Woman (or Man!) During The Weird Time In Your 20s' ***** - 'those Panicky Feelings Of Being A 24-30 Something Put Into Words' ***** - 'this Book Brings Forth A Sigh Of Relief. Excellent Book That Really Taps Into What So Many Of Us Are Thinking And Feeling, But Not Saying' *****

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The award-winning author of We Should All Be Feminists and Americanah gives us this powerful statement about feminism today—written as a letter to a friend.A few years ago, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie received a letter from a childhood friend, a new mother who wanted to know how to raise her baby girl to be a feminist. Dear Ijeawele is Adichie’s letter of response: fifteen invaluable suggestions—direct, wryly funny, and perceptive—for how to empower a daughter to become a strong, independent woman. Filled with compassionate guidance and advice, it gets right to the heart of sexual politics in the twenty-first century, and starts a new and urgently needed conversation about what it really means to be a woman today.A Skimm Reads Pick ● An NPR Best Book of the Year

Like any new mum, Laura Dockrill felt rather overwhelmed after the birth of her son. But a slow recovery, sleep deprivation and anxiety quickly escalated into postpartum psychosis, and she had to spend a fortnight in a psych ward, separated from her family. It was only when Laura began to put her ordeal into words that she began to find herself again, and recovery seemed within reach. This is Laura's raw, honest and life-affirming story of how she made it through one of the most frightening experiences a mother can face. Now, she wants to break down the silence around postnatal mental health, shatter the idealised expectations of perfect motherhood, and show all new struggling parents that they are not alone.

“Not all stories of adoption are stories of pain and regret. Not even most of them. Why don’t we ever get that movie?”India Allwood grew up wanting to be an actor. Armed with a stack of index cards (for research/line memorization/make-shift confetti), she goes from awkward sixteen-year-old to Broadway ingenue to TV superhero.Her new movie is a prestige picture about adoption, but its spin is the same old tired story of tragedy. India is an adoptive mom in real life though. She wants everyone to know there’s more to her family than pain and regret. So she does something you should never do ― she tells a journalist the truth: it’s a bad movie.Soon she’s at the center of a media storm, battling accusations from the press and the paparazzi, from protesters on the right and advocates on the left. Her twin ten-year-olds know they need help – and who better to call than family? But that’s where it gets really messy because India’s not just an adoptive mother…The one thing she knows for sure is what makes a family isn’t blood. And it isn’t love. No matter how they’re formed, the truth about family is this: it's complicated.

A cat and mouse game of surveillance and psychological torment develops between a middleaged artist and her aging mother, as Vigdis Hjorth returns to the themes of her controverdsial modern classic, Will and Testament\\n'To mother is to murder, or close enough', thinks Johanna, as she looks at the spelling of the two words in Norwegian. She's recently widowed and back in Oslo after a long absence as she prepares for a retrospective of her art.The subject of her work is motherhood and some of her more controversial paintings have brought aboiut a dramatic rift between parent and child. This new proximity, after decades of acrimonius absence, set both women on edge, and before too long Johanna finds her mother stalking her thoughts, and Johanna starts stalking her mother's house.

Winner of the Booker Prize 2020\\nWinner of 'Book of the Year' at the British Book Awards 2021\nWinner of 'Debut of the Year' at the British Book Awards 2021\nShortlisted for the US National Book Award for Fiction 2020\\n'Douglas Stuart has written a first novel of rare and lasting beauty' – Observer\\nIt is 1981. Glasgow is dying and good families must grift to survive. Agnes Bain has always expected more from life. She dreams of greater things: a house with its own front door and a life bought and paid for outright (like her perfect, but false, teeth). But Agnes is abandoned by her philandering husband, and soon she and her three children find themselves trapped in a decimated mining town. As she descends deeper into drink, the children try their best to save her, yet one by one they must abandon her to save themselves. It is her son Shuggie who holds out hope the longest.\\nShuggie is different. Fastidious and fussy, he shares his mother’s sense of snobbish propriety. The miners' children pick on him and adults condemn him as no’ right. But Shuggie believes that if he tries his hardest, he can be normal like the other boys and help his mother escape this hopeless place.\\nDouglas Stuart's Shuggie Bain lays bare the ruthlessness of poverty, the limits of love, and the hollowness of pride. A counterpart to the privileged Thatcher-era London of Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, it also recalls the work of Édouard Louis, Frank McCourt, and Hanya Yanagihara, a blistering debut by a brilliant writer with a powerful and important story to tell.\\n'We were bowled over by this first novel, which creates an amazingly intimate, compassionate, gripping portrait of addiction, courage and love.' – The judges of the Booker Prize

Amazon.com Review\\nEditors' pick:\nThoughtful, informative, revelatory, and questioning, Keys' memoir celebrates what it truly means to live a creative life."\n—Al Woodworth, Amazon Editor

One of the main topics of cultural conversation during the last decade was the supposed "fertility crisis," and whether modern women could figure out a way to way to have it all—a successful, demanding career and the required 2.3 children—before their biological clock stopped ticking. Now, however, conversation has turned to whether it's necessary to have it all (see Anne-Marie Slaughter) or, perhaps more controversial, whether children are really a requirement for a fulfilling life. The idea that some women and men prefer not to have children is often met with sharp criticism and incredulity by the public and mainstream media.\nIn this provocative and controversial collection of essays, curated by writer Meghan Daum, thirteen acclaimed female writers explain why they have chosen to eschew motherhood. Contributors include Lionel Shriver, Sigrid Nunez, Kate Christensen, Elliott Holt, Geoff Dyer, and Tim Kreider, among others, who will give a unique perspective on the overwhelming cultural pressure of parenthood.\nThis collection makes a smart and passionate case for why parenthood is not the only path to a happy, productive life, and takes our parent-centric, kid-fixated, baby-bump-patrolling culture to task in the process. In this book, that shadowy faction known as the childless-by-choice comes out into the light.\n For readers of Brigid Schulte and Debora Spar

How can we have better relationships?In this Sunday Times bestseller, leading psychotherapist Philippa Perry reveals the vital do's and don'ts of relationships. This is a book for us all. Whether you are interested in understanding how your upbringing has shaped you, looking to handle your child's feelings or wishing to support your partner, you will find indispensable information and realistic tips in these pages. Philippa Perry's sane, sage and judgement-free advice is an essential resource on how to have the best possible relationships with the people who matter to you most.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2019 OBSERVER FICTION PICKS 2019 | THE HERALD FICTION PICKS 2019 | THE IRISH TIMES FICTION PICKS 2019 | SCOTTISH REVIEW OF BOOKS FICTION PICKS 2019 | COSMOPOLITAN FICTION PICKS 2019Latticing one cherry pie after another, an Ohio housewife tries to bridge the gaps between reality and the torrent of meaningless info that is the United States of America. She worries about her children, her dead parents, African elephants, the bedroom rituals of 'happy couples', Weapons of Mass Destruction, and how to hatch an abandoned wood pigeon egg. Is there some trick to surviving survivalists? School shootings? Medical debts? Franks 'n' beans? A scorching indictment of America's barbarity, past and present, and a lament for the way we are sleepwalking into environmental disaster, Ducks, Newburyport is a heresy, a wonder - and a revolution in the novel."Ulysses has got nothing on this." -- Cosmopolitan

Teeming with life and crackling with energy - a love song to modern Britain and black womanhoodGirl, Woman, Other follows the lives and struggles of twelve very different characters. Mostly women, black and British, they tell the stories of their families, friends and lovers, across the country and through the years.Joyfully polyphonic and vibrantly contemporary, this is a gloriously new kind of history, a novel of our times: celebratory, ever-dynamic and utterly irresistible.

The runaway New York Times bestseller that shows American parents the secrets behind France's amazingly well-behaved children.*This edition also includes Bébé Day by Day: 100 Keys to French Parenting“On questions of how to live, the French never disappoint. . . . Maybe it all starts with childhood. That is the conclusion that readers may draw from Bringing Up Bébé.” —The Wall Street Journal“I’ve been a parent now for more than eight years, and—confession—I’ve never actually made it all the way through a parenting book. But I found Bringing Up Bébé to be irresistible.” —SlateWhen American journalist Pamela Druckerman had a baby in Paris, she didn't aspire to become a “French parent.” But she noticed that French children slept through the night by two or three months old. They ate braised leeks. They played by themselves while their parents sipped coffee. And yet French kids were still boisterous, curious, and creative. Why? How?With a notebook stashed in her diaper bag, Druckerman set out to investigate—and wound up sparking a national debate on parenting. Researched over three years and written in her warm, funny voice, Bringing Up Bébé is deeply wise, charmingly told, and destined to become a classic resource for American parents.

The story of a mother, her son, a locked room and the outside world Jack is five and, like any little boy, excited at the prospect of presents and cake. He's looking forward to telling his friends it's his birthday, too. But although Jack is a normal child in many ways – loving, funny, bright, full of energy and que

Working as a cook on a merchant ship, a woman comes to know and love Samsa, a woman who gives her the nickname “Boulder.” When Samsa gets a job in Reykjavik and the couple decides to move there together, Samsa decides that she wants to have a child. She is already forty and can’t bear to let the opportunity pass her by. Boulder is less enthused, but doesn’t know how to say no―and so finds herself dragged along on a journey that feels as thankless as it is alien.\nWith motherhood changing Samsa into a stranger, Boulder must decide where her priorities lie, and whether her yearning for freedom can truly trump her yearning for love.\nOnce again, Eva Baltasar demonstrates her preeminence as a chronicler of queer voices navigating a hostile world―and in prose as brittle and beautiful as an ancient saga.

Product Description Still Born is the story of two friends who make diametrically opposite choices in life. Alina and Laura are independent and career-driven women in their mid-thirties, neither of whom have ever built their future around the prospect of a family. Laura has taken the drastic decision to be sterilised, but as time goes by Alina becomes drawn to the idea of becoming a mother. When Alina’s daughter survives childbirth – after a diagnosis that predicted the opposite – and Laura becomes attached to her neighbour’s son, both women are forced to reckon with the complexity of their emotions. With her signature candour and insight, Nettel explores maternal ambivalence with a surgeon’s touch, carefully dissecting the contradictions that make up the lived experiences of women. Review ‘Nettel’s sharp, potent novel depicts how even the briefest relationship can affect the rest of a life.’ ― Publishers Weekly, starred review‘A compassionately written portrait of urban loneliness and the human impulse to belong.’ ― Kirkus ‘Guadalupe Nettel is a brilliant anatomist of love and perversity, and each new book is a revelation.’ ― Katie Kitamura‘Nettel’s eye lightly deforms things and gives rise to a tension, subtle but persistent, that immerses us in an uncomfortable reality, disquieting, even disturbing―a gaze that illuminates her prose like an alien sun shining down on our world.’ ― Valeria Luiselli About the Author Guadalupe Nettel was born in Mexico in 1973 and grew up between Mexico and France. She is the author of the international award-winning novels El huésped (2006), The Body Where I was Born (2011) and After the Winter (2014, Herralde Novel Prize). She has also published three collections of short stories: Les jours fossils (2002), Pétalos y otras historias incómodas (2008), Natural Histories (2013, Ribera del Duero Prize). In 2008 she was named by the Hay Festival as one of the more promising Latin American authors. Her work has been translated into more than ten languages and has appeared in publications such as Granta, The White Review, Le Magazine littéraire and L’Atelier du Roman. She currently lives in Mexico City where she is the director of the magazine Revista de la Universidad de México.

There are two schools of thought for encouraging babies to sleep through the night: the hotly debated Ferber technique of letting the baby "cry it out," or the grin-and-bear-it solution of getting up from dusk to dawn as often as necessary. If you don't believe in letting your baby cry it out, but desperately want to sleep, there is now a third option, presented in Elizabeth Pantley's sanity-saving book The No-Cry Sleep Solution.Pantley's successful solution has been tested and proven effective by scores of mothers and their babies from across the United States, Canada, and Europe. Based on her research, Pantley's guide provides you with effective strategies to overcoming naptime and nighttime problems. The No-Cry Sleep Solution offers clearly explained, step-by-step ideas that steer your little ones toward a good night's sleep--all with no crying.Tips from The No-Cry Sleep Solution: Uncover the stumbling blocks that prevent baby from sleeping through the night Determine--and work with--baby's biological sleep rhythms Create a customized, step-by-step plan to get baby to sleep through the night Use the Persistent Gentle Removal System to teach baby to fall asleep without breast-feeding, bottlefeeding, or using a pacifier