Still Born
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Still Born
Narrated by:
Rachel Schwab
Buy Now for £12.24
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Narrated by:
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Rachel Schwab
Shortlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize
A profound novel about motherhood, friendship, and the power of community from “one of the leading lights in contemporary Latin American literature” (Valeria Luiselli, author of Lost Children Archive).
Alina and Laura are independent and career-driven women in their mid-thirties, neither of whom have built their future around the prospect of a family. Laura is so determined not to become a mother that she has taken the drastic decision to have her tubes tied. But when she announces this to her friend, she learns that Alina has made the opposite decision and is preparing to have a child of her own.
Alina’s pregnancy shakes the women’s lives, first creating distance and then a remarkable closeness between them. When Alina’s daughter survives childbirth – after a diagnosis that predicted the opposite – and Laura becomes attached to her neighbor’s son, both women are forced to reckon with the complexity of their emotions, their needs, and the needs of the people who are dependent upon them.
In prose that is as gripping as it is insightful, Guadalupe Nettel explores maternal ambivalence with a surgeon’s touch, carefully dissecting the contradictions that make up the lived experiences of women.©2022 Guadalupe Nettel (P)2023 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
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Critic reviews
Haunting . . . A heart-racingly intense journey.
Both uplifting and gut-wrenching, often at the same time . . . At its heart, it is a story about the many different ways to be a family, and it made me reflect on what an honor it is to care for someone you truly love.
Blurs the lines between parents and caregivers, between family members and strangers, between mother and not-mother . . . features deep and tumultuous relationships . . . Still Born argues . . . that, at certain moments, it is incumbent upon everyone to presume, to pry, to push your way into the hallway. You don’t have to be a mother—in fact, maybe you shouldn’t be. But you have to do something for whomever you find in, or near, your nest.
With a twisty, enveloping plot, the novel poses some of the knottiest questions about freedom, disability, and dependence—all in language so blunt it burns.
Guadalupe Nettel is a brilliant anatomist of love and perversity, and each new book is a revelation.
Guadalupe Nettel renders with great veracity life as it is encountered in the everyday, taking us to the heart of the only things that really matter: life, death and our relationships with others.
Nettel is one of the leading lights in contemporary Latin American literature. ... profound and penetrating.
Still Born complicates the idea of having children . . . fascinating . . . a book about the way caregiving can seep, imperfectly, into a person’s life.
Subtle and thought provoking . . . a complicated portrait of the different, nuanced forms caregiving can take.
Timely and nuanced questions of motherly and sibling love float through . . . [a] sneakily profound book . . . Nettel’s prose is clear; Harvey's translation is elegant, and the stories Laura tells are straightforward.
The prose, which appears in an elegant translation by Rosalind Harvey, retains a matter-of-factness, and in some places a synoptic quality that is rarely freighted with sadness or despair. … It’s friendship, not crisis, that emerges as the novel’s focal point. … Nettel… seems to be saying that ‘normal mothers’ do think ugly thoughts—or rather, that there is no such thing as a ‘normal mother.’ There is a strong tradition of works that connect maternal ambivalence to horror tropes—Rosemary’s Baby, The Fifth Child, We Need to Talk about Kevin—but Still Born is different. … Nettel is making a case for chosen kinship.
Using spare, potent prose, Nettel mines the complexities of feminism, caregiving, and what it means to love unconditionally . . . This will resonate with readers.
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