In the midst of so many literary reconsiderations of motherhood, this book announces itself as an essential left-field addition to the contemporary canon — a story of a career nanny, a professional mother substitute, yearning for a child as a way to undo and reconfigure the physical and emotional violence of an ex-girlfriend; unraveling, too, the way her self-formation as a mother-in-absence, a body to be depleted and taken for granted, dovetailed with her experience of domestic abuse. K Chiucarello is a thrilling, forthright, sensual, deeply perceptive writer; NANNY NANNY comes at you like an incendiary secret, a sweet and dangerous flame kindled in the dark.
Jia Tolentino, New York Times bestselling author of Trick Mirror