Motherhood is a complex and deeply personal journey, filled with love, challenges, and growth. There are many books that beautifully capture the essence of this experience, here are six compelling stories we’d like to highlight ahead of Mother’s Day, each offering their own unique and insightful perspectives.
These books offer a rich tapestry of stories that resonate with the universal experiences of motherhood.
Using her emotional and powerful writing, prizewinning author Kerry Hudson navigates trying to build a nourishing, safe and loving family — without a blueprint to work from.
A beautiful, vibrant memoir, Newborn illuminates Kerry’s experiences of becoming a mother, reshaping her future and reclaiming her identity.
One day, the mother was a mother but then, one night, she was quite suddenly something else...
With a unique twist on the trials and experiences that come with new motherhood, Rachel Yoder creates a bewitching story that will capitvate you from cover to cover—but don’t just take our word for it, Bonnie Garmus describes Nightbitch as ‘outrageous, smart and fun’.
Sethe is now miles away from Sweet Home - the farm where she was kept as a slave for many years. Unable to forget the unspeakable horrors that took place there, Sethe is haunted by the violent spectre of her dead child, the daughter who died nameless and whose tombstone is etched with a single word, 'Beloved'.
A tale of brutality, horror and, above all, love at any cost, Beloved is Toni Morrison's enduring masterpiece and best-known work.
From the Booker Prize-winning author Anne Enright comes a contemporary novel of daughterhood and motherhood. The Wren, The Wren is a multigenerational novel, tracing the inheritance of not just trauma but also wonder — a testament to the glorious resilience of women in the face of promises false and true.
But above all, this is an exploration of love between mother and daughter — sometimes fierce, often painful, but always transcendent.
Having reached an age when most of her peers are asking themselves when they will become mothers, Yeti’s narrator considers, with the same urgency, whether she will do so at all. Motherhood raises radical and essential questions about womanhood, parenthood, and how —and for whom — to live.
Read when Guardian describes as the novel ‘likely to become the defining literary work on the subject’.
Isn’t parenthood all about sacrifice?
When a young teacher is found murdered with only ten adorable four-year-olds as witnesses, it soon becomes clear that the children aren’t just witnesses—they’re suspects…and so are their mothers.
Part murder mystery, part motherhood manifesto, Cutting Teeth explores the standards society holds mothers to — along with the ones to which we hold ourselves — and the things no one tells you about becoming a parent.
