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Reading lists

Books to read if you’re expecting a baby

A Death and Life Story

The Red of my Blood

THE INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 
 
'With brutal, beautiful honesty, Clover articulates how bereavement shocks and dislocates - and in all the pain, there's SO much life.' MARIAN KEYES 
 
'MUST READ ... A remarkable acount of love and grief.' - DAILY MAIL 
 
'She is a vigorous and fearless writer, grabbing us by the throat to describe life's horrors and her responses to them, filling her pages with the magnetic force of her own life as wife, lover and mother of five which somehow has to go on.' SPECTATOR 
............................................... 
 
'Can death bring something good to my life?' 
 
A few weeks before Christmas, Clover's sister died of breast cancer, aged forty-six. Just days before, she had been given years to live. Her sudden death split Clover's life apart. The Red of My Blood charts Clover's fearless passage through the first year after her sister's death. 
 
It is a book about what life feels like when death interrupts it, and about bearing the unbearable and describing an experience that seems beyond words. Lyrical, hopeful, it is also about the magical way in which death and life exist so vividly beside one another, and the wonder of being human. 
 
'A beautiful addition to the literature of loss. It will serve as a lit match, to be passed from one person to the next in the darkest moments.' THE SUNDAY TIMES

Stroud's beautiful new memoir, The Red of My Blood, is studded with agonising moments ... This is a colourful blast of feeling that picks up on the hallucinogenic oddness of grief, along with the importance of honouring death as an unavoidable part of life.

Like a magician, she puts her grief into a hat and pulls out 70,000 perfect words to describe what it is like when language fails you. Courageous and utterly compelling, this is a book that will wring you out, wear you down and leave you filled with wonder.

Clover writes with visceral honesty about the lived experience of her grief for her sister Nell - in all its hues; moving swiftly between darkness and light whilst her love for Nell remains powerfully alive and present.

The Red of my Blood is one of the most haunting, gripping books I've read in recent memory. Stroud's writing about overwhelming loss is knife-sharp, beautiful, and profound.  This is a masterful memoir, which will echo with its readers for a long time.

Madeline Miller, author of The Song of Achilles and Circe

Clover's writing is sensationally beautiful and so quick with life in the face of utter bereavement as to be almost a resurrection in itself. She is as golden as her sister clearly was.

I love Clover Stroud's writing. It feels like she's mining for treasure, drilling down with lyrical prose, getting to the thing that makes us human. That this book about death and grief is so life-affirming is a testament to her talent.

Clover Stroud is a fearless explorer of the human heart, and a writer of incomparable grace and passion. She also understands more about loss, sorrow, grief, and resilience than most people will ever have to learn. She is a gift, and so is her work.

A miracle of a book. A hope of a book. An absolute gutting masterpiece of a book so that it transcends book and becomes a record of life, a symphony of love and all the pain that must be endured to hear that kind of glittering gorgeous love. A must read for anyone with a soul.

With brutal, beautiful honesty, Clover articulates how bereavement shocks and dislocates - 
 and in all the pain, there's SO much life.

I am reeling from the beauty and blazing honesty of The Red of My Blood. What a brave, golden and unflinching piece of writing. It transcends the personal and shines its light not only on the devastation of loss and grief, but the (sometimes unwanted) process of living inside and beside it.

This brilliant book is beautiful without being pretty; it's a gut punch, a cry from the heart on behalf of everyone who has been unmade by the death of a loved one.

The most beautiful, enduring, indelible, transcendent love letter from a sister to a sister that I will ever read: this is a book that speaks to anyone for whom shared experience, wisdom, laughter and mutual love for one another has occupied the core of existence. Light in darkness...what more can we possibly ask for in life?... yet this is the shining beacon that Clover Stroud holds out to us in her astonishing book.

So beautiful, compelling and raw. Clover records the shifting, glittering rainbow of her experience of love and death with extraordinary honesty and precision.

A beautiful, powerful and spell-binding book about the meaning of death, life, loss and love, and above all sisterhood, in all its frightening wonder. There is something so instinctively raw and yet lyrical about the way Clover Stroud writes, because everything she writes comes from her heart. I felt the power and colour of every word seep into my skin. I shan't forget this book.

Huma Qureshi, author of Things We Do Not Tell The People We Love  and  How We Met: a memoir of love and other misadventures

A viscerally intense and raw memoir of grief - honest, questioning, furious, heartbroken - this book will stay with me for a very long time.

Stroud, like CS Lewis and Joan Didion before her, shares the excruciating love story that is grief with a visceral immediacy. I read it in a day and felt both forewarned and unexpectedly warmed by the gales of love in her loss.

A gripping, shimmering testament to the deep love between sisters, and the preciousness of life itself. Heartbreaking, beautiful, I loved it.

A sister's love - unforgettable, by its telling.  This is a clear sighted gaze at those brave, beautiful heartbreaking moments that find us, standing, in life, intimately close to deaths presence, and trusting that a full life exists and continues, ahead, through and beyond our imagining, and love.

Shameless and so audaciously, viscerally precise that it sends shivers down your spine. This is very sad in places but it's also triumphant, joyous and what's most triumphant is it's not really a book about death at all, but about life and about love, most of all love.  I'm in awe.

Clover Stroud's song of sorrow for the death of her beloved sister: an extraordinary obituary of love, and a testament to life amid all its griefs.

I have read The Red of My Blood with awe. It really is exceptional. It shoots so high and far, and yet comes up so close. 
 The blazing directness is inspiring. So is the encircling, real, emblematic landscape. And I caught my breath at some apparently tiny, corner-of-the-eye oblique moments. 
 It is so really rich and really true. And only Clover could have written it.

'The Red of My Blood touched me deeply. It is such a powerful, honest, and passionate book - an immersion into the very essence of love and connection. I went on the journey with you, into the dark and fearful places, the knife that cut you - God I felt that! and out into a new way of seeing the world, and accepting it. I know it's not over, or ever will be... but what a fiery start!'

Amazing.  Brilliantly written, it throws you right into the furnace of grief. It is pure emotion and what drives it is not only love but the energy of rage. I have never read anything which is written with such glorious fury.

Clover Stroud articulates loss so beautifully- without a shred of sentimentality or self-indulgence.

Clover is fearless in her quest to write about how life really feels.

[Clover Stroud is] a vigorous and fearless writer, grabbing us by the throat to describe life's horrors and her responses to them, filling her pages with the magnetic force of her own life as wife, lover and mother of five which somehow has to go on.

What makes The Red of My Blood so memorable is Stroud's Proustian attention to colour, smell and sound ... a beautiful addition to the literature of loss. It will serve as a lit match, to be passed from one person to the next in the darkest moments.

A howl of love and rage. It is an elegy of outstanding beauty.

The beauty of Clover's book is that there is no neat ending, just as in death there so often isn't. What's left, however messy, is the search for a different way of living

Clover Stroud is a writer and journalist, writing regularly for the Sunday Times, the Guardian and the Saturday and Sunday Telegraph, among others. She also hosts a popular podcast called Tiny Acts of Bravery. Her first book, The Wild Other, was shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize. Her critically acclaimed second book, My Wild and Sleepless Nights: A Mother's Story, and third book, The Red of My Blood: A Death and Life Story, were instant Sunday Times bestsellers and rated 'best books of the year'. She is currently living in Washington DC with her husband and the youngest three of her five children.

My Wild and Sleepless Nights

The brave, raw Sunday Times bestselling memoir

'What does being a mother really feel like? Clover Stroud's powerhouse of a memoir gets closer than anything else I have read to answering that question.' Alice O'Keeffe, The Guardian. 
 
From the Sunday Times Bestselling author Clover Stroud, comes a raw, honest and deeply personal account of what it means to be a mother, touching on motherhood, identity and sexuality.

A beautifully written, brutally honest dissection of motherhood by a woman who has five children, from pregnancy to teenagers, covering both the extreme highs and lows. Stroud's writing examines what it is to be a woman with the same sensitive skill fans of her first memoir, The Wild Other, will recall.

The best evocation of the all-consuming, self-eroding reality of motherhood, while also being luminous with love.

What does being a mother really feel like? Clover Stroud’s powerhouse of a memoir gets closer than anything else I have read to answering that question. The motherhood she describes is the very antithesis of the sanitised, smiling vision we are sold in washing powder ads... She excels in evoking the feral, instinctive forces that motherhood unleashes... This is a vision of motherhood for the (now middle-aged) MDMA generation... The reader is simply swept up in her painful, wonderful world. Buy it, read it, and enjoy it for the wild ride it is.

Clover Stroud's brilliantly unvarnished memoir finds the heroism and poetry in having kids ... Much of this book ..reads like a nature memoir, full of landscape both external and internal  ... How brilliant for someone to write about the blankness as well as the beauty.

This is quite simply the best book about motherhood I have ever read: touching, tender, honest and true. Even as she’s bracingly direct about the frustrations of motherhood, Stroud also revels in the delights. Bliss and boredom coexist side by side — and the contradictions are at the core of it all. Stroud’s book will give anyone heading out on this fearsome journey a lantern to guide the way. The book is not always pretty, and sometimes its directness is shocking, but it is full of love and honesty.

Brilliant motherhood memoir...Clover Stroud is one of the very best writers on the light and dark of motherhood and, if you enjoyed her debut The Wild Other, you'll love this. The book follows the first year of her fifth child's life as she juggles looking after a newborn with dealing with her teenage son's problematic behaviour. The writing is sublime and honest.

Best Books of 2020: a touching guide to the joys and terrors of parenting.

A visceral story of pregnancy and domestic mayhem...[full of] raw primal maternal energy.

BEST NON-FICTION OF 2020: Clover Stroud charts the highs and lows of motherhood in all their deep, dark glory.

Rare are the books about motherhood, rarer still; the true, the generous, tender, resonant ones. This is that book. I loved it and I love Clover’s voice.

Clover Stroud writes with precise intimacy and fearless honesty. She has somehow found a wholly original way to describe motherhood and, in doing so, truly conveys what it's like, in all its messy, sexy glory.

I have been waiting for a book like this for a long time. Stroud captures the very essence of motherhood in all its contradictions - the brutal loveliness of what it is to mother another, and how the act of doing so breaks us open in ways both wonderful and terrible. There are few other books about motherhood as brave, honest and beautifully written as this one.

Sarah Langford, author of In Your Defence

The best memoirists don’t just tell us about their lives – they tell us something about our lives, too. And Clover Stroud is one of our finest contemporary memoirists. My Wild and Sleepless Nights – her pitiless examination of her life as the mother of five children – is a masterpiece.

I read in one greedy gulp and am still slightly reeling. Extraordinary writing… For mothers and those even vaguely interested in family dynamics it is fascinating.

I ripped through it. Bravo brave Clover Stroud, who writes about “raw and animal” motherhood in a way that make sense to me.

So raw and vivid. Clover is amazing and honest – she tells it.

Brilliant – touching, tender, honest and so true. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything like it. It captures that hopeless sense of how much you love your children and how powerless you feel as they grow up and away from you.

What a beautiful writer Clover Stroud is! This honest look at the high and lows of the roller coaster that is maternal life and love is both joyous and exhilarating.

A compelling read. Clover writes so beautifully and somehow manages to give shape to the mess and madness of motherhood.

Stroud writes with moving, eloquent honesty.

Stroud's honesty as a writer is blistering.

It's the honesty that makes this book so compelling.

I devoured it in one gollop. Clover’s extreme honesty is a rare and lovely thing. A wonderful book.

As tender, blazing, funny and unflinching as the love it describes. At last someone has given a voice to the days spent hiding at the school gates, and scrambling for items of vaguely matching PE kit, and mouldy orange peel down the sofa, and the love that can reduce me to tears on an almost daily basis. I want to give this triumphant  book to every mother I know. I want to say to them, Look what we did and we do; and it’s all in here.

Clover’s writing is visceral and brilliant, and motherhood is her topic.

Editor's Choice: It left me both nodding and groaning in recognition as well as reeling with empathy and admiration ... there's no doubting that all the pain and glory of birthing and nurturing new beings is wholeheartedly expressed here.

The ecstasies, the agonies, the passion and the pain. Reading Clover Stroud is a whole body experience.

Addresses what motherhood really feels like... She writes about raising five children with honesty and poignancy, revealing universal truths along the way.

Stroud's warm and honest memoir is the take on parenting we all need. An unflinching look at how to hold on to your own personality when motherhood threatens to submerge it.

Stroud’s clear-eyed look at how wildness and domesticity have entwined in her life is both heartening and inspiring.

Clover Stroud writes with such startling vivacity and honesty about motherhood, this book has its own heartbeat. It crackles with life - its messiness, darkness, and joy. I loved it.

Eve Chase, author Black Rabbit Hall and The Vanishing of Audrey Wilde

Clover’s expertise is writing about family life in a way that feels both new and entirely familiar. How Clover talks about motherhood is very different to the ways you see it talked about – I think we’ve got two polarised narratives in media at the moment and she fuses them together to find this new place. She’s really put into words how I feel as a mother – that it is this intense, almost sickening, love, but it is also an absolute fear that you don’t ever know how you’d live without them. I really recommend My Wild and Sleepless Nights.

Her descriptions leap off the page... It's the honesty that makes this book so compelling.

Clover Stroud managed to write down all of the mania in one place, making me shed a tear and honk with laughter…she writes so eloquently about all we lose as well as gain through our children.

'Clover Stroud is a wonderful writer of the most colourful prose

My Wild and Sleepless Nights by Clover Stroud is a robust, raw and rare celebration of motherhood that had me laughing out loud one moment and crying the next.

A captivating guide to the joys and terrors of motherhood.

An electrically candid memoir...raw, elemental and beautiful.

'Raw, elemental and beautiful.' Telegraph 
'This is quite simply the best book about motherhood I have ever read.' - Eleanor Mills in the Sunday Times 
 
Mother to five children, Clover Stroud has navigated family life across two decades, both losing and finding herself. In her touching, provocative and profoundly insightful book, she captures a sense of what motherhood really feels like - how intense, sensuous, joyful, boring, profound and dark it can be. 
 
My Wild and Sleepless Nights examines what it means to be a mother, and reveals with unflinching honesty the many conflicting emotions that this entails: the joy and the wonder, the loneliness and despair. 
 
MORE PRAISE FOR CLOVER STROUD: 
'Clover's expertise is writing about family life in a way that feels both new and entirely familiar' - Pandora Sykes 
'As tender, blazing, funny and unflinching as the love it describes. I want to give this triumphant book to every mother I know' - Rachel Joyce 
'Stroud is always willing to rip open her very soul in order to reveal the truth about her life - and every time a woman tells the truth like this, it sets another woman free' - Elizabeth Gilbert 
'I read in one greedy gulp and am still slightly reeling. Extraordinary writing... For mothers and those even vaguely interested in family dynamics it is fascinating' - Alexandra Heminsley 
 
Charting the course of one year, the first in her youngest child's life, Clover searches for answers to questions that many of us would be too afraid to admit to - not only about motherhood, but also about female sexuality and identity. Her story will speak to all mothers, and anyone about to embark on that journey.

Scenes from a marriage

I Want My Life With You

Clover Stroud is a writer and journalist, writing regularly for the Sunday Times, the Guardian and the Saturday and Sunday Telegraph, among others. She also hosts a popular podcast called Tiny Acts of Bravery. Her first book, The Wild Other, was shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize. Her critically acclaimed second book, My Wild and Sleepless Nights: A Mother's Story, and third book, The Red of My Blood: A Death and Life Story, were instant Sunday Times bestsellers and rated 'best books of the year'. She is now back in Oxfordshire, having spent three years in Washington DC with her husband and the youngest three of her five children.

What makes a good marriage? 
 
Clover has been married to Pete for fifteen years. Together they have brought up five children. But for much of that time they have been apart. Now walking into mid-life, for Clover their marriage feels fragile. Many of their peers are divorcing, or opening their marriage, or coming out as polyamorous. When Pete’s work keeps him in Washington DC, Clover packs up her home and children to cross the Atlantic and join him. It is an active commitment to their relationship. 
 
The move, and the apparent gloss of the Washington life surrounding her, forces Clover to reflect on her marriage. So often, what appears from the outside of a relationship is entirely different to what’s going on inside. What are the sacrifices a couple make? Can you grow as an individual, yet remain part of a committed partnership? What do we lose of ourselves? 
 
As she navigates a new country, that is itself in a state of flux and change, Clover explores the emotional landscape of both her marriage, and mid-life, searching for what she finds she needs, and in the end, what she wants.

Clover Stroud

A deeply felt meditation on home, belonging, place and memory … Restless, questing, The Giant on the Skyline is a travel book about wanting to stay put: a pilgrimage through a fabled English landscape … Stroud’s best memoir yet, the most invigoratingly expansive, strikingly written. Moving … Transformative.

Stroud writes gloriously… a deeply thoughtful exploration of the meaning of home and belonging.

Perhaps more than any other writer, Stroud has taken the elegant, elliptical memoir and forged it into the genre of life writing … In the Giant on the Skyline, Stroud has produced something exceptional: a mystical meditatation on what home means and what constitutes belonging … It is magical and haunting and profoundly moving. Stroud is exceptionally evocative when writing about nature and family … even grungy Wantage with its Greggs and charity shops sounds alluring the way Stroud describes it.

Stroud’s writing is assured, visceral, sexy as well as sensuous, richly coloured in every way, and often freshly poetic, whether dealing with a toddler’s tears over the broccoli touching the gravy, or with death and loss. She paints her way through the book with striking word pictures … Orgasmic time, druids, gentle giants… The reader swirls like a leaf on a stream, coming out amazed by the richness – and unknownness – of other people’s lives.

One of the books we're most looking forward to in 2024: I'm a huge fan of Clover Stroud's writing and this memoir about home and what it means to us sounds fascinating.

Stroud captures raw emotion, capturing themes of adventure, grief and the healing power of nature. Her latest book is a heartfelt meditation on what makes a home.

Clover Stroud is expert at bringing her reader right to the heart of her longing. Her writing is intimate and warm, honest and generous. A true memoirist, she looks to people and place as her canvas, in this case the psychic and physical hold of the landscape and what we call home. The Giant on the Skyline is timeless and yet firmly rooted in time, magical and mysterious and yet earthy and sensual. It is full of personality, humour and heart and I did not want it to end.

In this new giant of a book, perhaps Clover’s most profound and moving, and unquestionably her most soaringly beautiful, Clover Stroud confronts the wrench from a place that might define her and shows how the resounding power of love tethers the soul.

I can’t remember the last time I underlined so much and folded down so many pages in a book the way I have with this. What a wonderful, wise, magical book. I’ve loved all Clover Stroud’s books but The Giant on the Skyline is really quite incredible.

Rachael Lucas, author of The Cottage on the Shore

Clover has turned her truth-seeing gaze on a tiny corner of the English landscape. This book is drenched in some of the most brilliant writing about place I’ve read in a long while. It’s as evocative as Laurie Lee, chalked up with Clover’s incisive, poetic encounters with magic, pain and belonging. A beautiful book, written in lyrical, liquid prose that seems to flow straight from the heart to the page.

Sophy Roberts, author of Lost Pianos of Siberia

I was captivated by the intimacy of Clover’s writing about home, and what it means to her. The honesty and creativity with which she mines her life and heart are inspirational on so many levels. I sat down to read a chapter or two, and finished almost the entire book in a sitting - somehow this is what always happens to me with Clover’s work. Few writers I know have this intense intimacy, or such an immediately engaging effect on a reader. It really is magic.

Clover is a remarkable storyteller with an uncanny ability to burrow beneath the surface of the everyday and illuminate the hidden places of the human heart. Written in characteristically lucid prose and with endearing honesty, The Giant on the Skyline is a vivid and captivating book about what it means to belong to a place – and still find the courage to leave it.

Dr Sharon Blackie, author of If Women Rose Rooted

Stroud's best book yet: candid, primal, irresistibly intense ... her feeling for life, death, place and family makes you want to follow her anywhere.

Julie Myerson, author of The Lost Child and Home

Stroud's new book is somehow able make the domestic magical, the ancient present, and the specific meaningful to us all. Her liquid prose is shot through with threads of gold, which pull us towards a deeper, richer understanding of something so many of us are searching for as she uncovers it for herself. In her quest to put into words this ephemeral place called ‘home’, this book will leave you feeling like you have journeyed not just with Stroud, but with giants.

Sarah Langford, author of In Your Defence and Rooted

I loved this powerful, poetic exploration of our connections to both place and people, the ties that bind us to the earth and each other, those that tear us apart and bring us back together. 
A moving, beautifully written journey through both physical and emotional terrains - from the ancient Ridgeway trail in England to Washington USA, and through love, rage and courage - as the author shares her search for a sense of home and explores both the pain and adventure of leaving home and creating a new one. 
I lapped up this lyrical meditation on landscape, love and learning to belong.

Anita Sethi, author of I Belong Here: a Journey Along the Backbone of Britain

I will read anything Stroud writes and this new memoir is as raw, open and thoughtful as her previous books.

Magical, heart-and-soul writing. Clover Stroud is sharing a conversation with land that resonates in my very bones.

This incredibly special book will make you think of all the places and people you have ever called home. A beautiful, reflective memoir about how we make sense of who we are and how our favourite parts of the world will always be carried within us.

No one writes so vividly, or movingly, about the beauties and perils of family, home, and what it means to belong. The Giant on the Skyline is a gloriously immersive read, and one to which I know I will return again and again.

Katie Hickman, novelist, historian and travel writer

Clover’s writing just gets more interesting and I loved this fluid, trippy book about what places give to us and what we bring to places.

Amy Liptrot, author of The Outrun and The Instant

The Giant on the Skyline is electric, brilliant and full of revelations. Clover is the queen of sharp, enchanting writing; red hot with the truth of how it feels to be alive. A book that will make you look at the everyday magic and pain of home with new wonder.

I loved this book about leaving home and how to make one. I'm in awe of Clover's emotional clarity: how she can summon on the page all the complexity and intensity of life in all its forms. She writes with force, power, and a radical transparency. It's a gift"

Cal Flynn, author of Islands of Abandonment

Clover Stroud is one of my favourite writers and The Giant on the Skyline is easily my favourite of her books. Her prose is so lucid - seemingly effortless - whether she is describing the dynamics of her family life, the precise, piercing nature of loss and grief, or her fierce love for the corner of England she has chosen to make her home. She moves from the quotidian to the mystical and back again with such ease, such openness: a beautiful, transformative work of art.

Anna Hope, author of Expectation and The Ballroom

There is magic in Clover Stroud's writing. The Giant on the Skyline finds Stroud at the height of her powers of observation and articulation, a beautifully elucidated exploration of land and place, care and interdependence, woven with existential truths and layers of attention and noticing. Lyrical and sharp, this book is a gift.

I’m blown away by Clover’s writing. So impressive, inspiring, fluid, honest and resonant.’

James Aldred, author of Goshawk Summer, winner of the Wainright Prize for Nature Writing

Beautiful and moving ... Raw, honest and poignant memoir

In fluid prose she explores the connection between herself and the landscape, shifting between the factual and a quasi-fictional realm of giants and fairies ... The Giant on the Skyline is a potent reminder, as Stroud takes a step into the unknown, of the ways in which places become part of you.

On Home, Belonging and Learning to Let Go

What is it that makes a home? What is a home without the roots that tie you to a place? What is a home when a family is split? 
 
Clover's eldest children are leaving home for university. Her husband Pete's work is in America. The only way for Clover and the younger children to live with him is to uproot, leave their rural life near the ancient Ridgeway in Oxfordshire and move to Washington DC. Forced to leave the home she loves and consider these questions, Clover sets out to explore the place where she lives, walk the Ridgway, understand a little of the history of her landscape and work out why it is that it is so hard for her to go. In doing so she paints a beautifully layered portrait of family, community and of belonging in a landscape that has drawn people to it for generation after generation.

Clover Stroud

Books by Clover Stroud

Articles featuring Clover Stroud

Books to read if you’re expecting a baby

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