On the birth of your first child, your world changes. It’s a seismic shift.
These brilliant books – all novels bar one – encapsulate the way the world changes, the joy and the intensity. They describe motherhood in its many guises in honest and refreshing ways, from inside and from out. And they’re perfect Mothers Day gifts for any reader.
Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy
Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2024, this is an intense and raw read about the strength of feeling a mother has for her newborn son. It’s written as an honest account of life with a child – primarily in that brutal first year when your entire identity is stripped from you and you’re too tired to work out who you have become. It’s a love letter to the child, a viscerally vivid and intensely vital description of post-partum feelings, a roller-coaster of emotions that roll relentlessly from joy to despair and back again.
If you’ve had a baby, you’ll almost certainly see yourself in Kilroy’s words; you’ll feel yourself back in that terrible and terrific time that comes after the momentous arrival of the newborn. The book is an equally contrary read – it’s a relief not to be living that period of life again and yet I didn’t want to reach the end.
And when I did, I wept, that I was no longer the mum of a baby.
(My older son, who unexpectedly read and then recommended Soldier Sailor to me, is now 22).
Soldier Sailor is also an open window into the thoughts of most women, however competent they once were, when they suddenly find themselves at home alone with a baby. For that reason, this is also a book for men. I recommend buying a copy for the father of any new baby too – I am certain they’ll find it thought-provoking and enlightening. Because it clearly explains the behaviours of their partner, it’s the perfect accompaniment to any how-to-look-after-a-new-baby manual on the shelf. After all, the best thing you can o for a child is look after its mother.
My Wild and Sleepless Nights by Clover Stroud
And if you enjoy Soldier Sailor, or prefer a memoir to a novel, Clover Stroud’s memoir My Wild and Sleepless Nights describes the emotional journey through the first year of her fifth child’s life. At 45, Clover is an ordinary and exceptional mother: she’s exceptional because she has five children (aged from 3 to 19) and bares her soul as well as breasts. It’s dramatic and desperate as Clover speaks all the jumbled thoughts and feelings I had on my own journey, the good, the bad and the ugly, but would never had written, or maybe even admitted: yet every page is a step that I recall, with its corresponding mess, guilt, contentment, joy and luminous shards of heavenly light and love. And because it holds a mirror up in which I see so many of my own experiences and corresponding emotions, it’s incredibly liberating. (Read my full review.)
All My Mothers by Joanna Glen
Young Eva’s mother is not what Eva thinks a mother should be, and she questions whether she could even be her mother at all. Eva spends her childhood envisioning other women as her mother. Each of these has different qualities, and each she categorises as a different colour: Green Mother, for example, “was serene and beautiful, barefoot in a glimmering field beside a mossy waterfall,” whilst “Grey Mother was soft-faced, wearing pince-nez glasses in a room full of rickety bookshelves, with a globe and an atlas.”
What colour would you be?
All of these women may not have been Eva’s mum, but she had rich relationships with each of them; each added to her life in different ways, begging the questions, what is motherhood beyond the physical delivery of a child, and is blood really thicker than water?
Published in 2021, this novel is emotionally engaging, a captivating easy-to-read mystery and a wonderful reminder that no one can be every type of mum to their own children. We each have different qualities and they should be celebrated.
All My Mothers was recommended to me by my daughter (24) who has very a very different taste in books to me, and I loved it as much as she it did. I am sure you will too.
No Small Thing by Orlaine McDonald
No Small Thing by Orlaine McDonald, also given to me by my daughter, was shortlisted for the 2024 Nero Book Awards for Debut Fiction. It too follows a young girl, Summer, whose mother Mickey’s life is a mess and so the pair of them go to live, on a London estate, with a grandmother, Livia, who she doesn’t know. Livia’s own mother, as a memory, is a fourth character and so four generations of women and three sets of mother-daughter relationships form the core of this novel. Their difference and difficulties, resentments and responsibilities are explored through the musings of a neighbour, Earl, who quietly sees more than the women realise from his balcony. This a rich and deft exploration of motherhood in the real world, in the difficult circumstances of many families. It’s full of pathos, and you’ll want to shout into the pages to break the cycle and put things right.
No Small Thing will be out in paperback in June.
Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart
If you enjoy No Small Thing, then you might also like Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart, which is a heavy-duty hard-hitting but brilliant story of a young boy’s relationship with his alcoholic mother. In an exceptionally tough childhood, Shuggie’s love for her is unwavering, even in the face of her neglect and cruelty. Inspired by the author’s own life experiences, this Booker Prize winner (2020) is an emotional illustration of the extraordinary strength of the bond between a child and their mother, however bad things become, and – it’s both heart-breaking and a beacon of hope.
Three Days in June by Anne Tyler
And for those who now have adult children, going out into the world and forging their own paths, this year’s offering by Anne Tyler, Three Days in June (2025), is an understated delight full of deep feeling that often isn’t voiced as a mother’s daughter is on the cusp of getting married.
Read the Times2 review.
