Review
'Sarah Moss writes the kind of books that are difficult to put down' --Louise Welch, Financial Times
`Moss writes marvellously (and often hilariously). Alison Pearson for intellectuals' --The Times
'Tartly humorous, sad and clever ... a passionately written meditation on motherhood' --Sunday Times
'fresh and illuminating' --Guardian
`Moss's second novel is set to cement her reputation as one of contemporary fiction's brightest stars'
--Stylist
'Tightly plotted, brilliantly observed ... Sarah Moss writes the kind of books that are difficult to put down' --Louise Welch, Financial Times
`Moss writes marvellously (and often hilariously) about the clash between career and motherhood. Alison Pearson for intellectuals' --The Times
'Moss threads historical research into her fiction in a way that is fresh and illuminating' --Guardian
'An original and accomplished novel' --Daily Mail
`Tartly humorous, sad and clever ... a passionately written meditation on motherhood, with all the monotony and visceral feelings faithfully recorded'
--Sunday Times
Highly enjoyable second novel from Sarah Moss ... The upbeat conclusion to this blend of middle-class satire, historical fiction and campus novel does not soften Moss's withering take on sexism and her stark view of motherhood.
--Telegraph
`Moss writes marvellously (and often hilariously). Alison Pearson for intellectuals' --The Times
'Tartly humorous, sad and clever ... a passionately written meditation on motherhood' --Sunday Times
'fresh and illuminating' --Guardian
`Moss's second novel is set to cement her reputation as one of contemporary fiction's brightest stars'
--Stylist
'Tightly plotted, brilliantly observed ... Sarah Moss writes the kind of books that are difficult to put down' --Louise Welch, Financial Times
`Moss writes marvellously (and often hilariously) about the clash between career and motherhood. Alison Pearson for intellectuals' --The Times
'Moss threads historical research into her fiction in a way that is fresh and illuminating' --Guardian
'An original and accomplished novel' --Daily Mail
`Tartly humorous, sad and clever ... a passionately written meditation on motherhood, with all the monotony and visceral feelings faithfully recorded'
--Sunday Times
Highly enjoyable second novel from Sarah Moss ... The upbeat conclusion to this blend of middle-class satire, historical fiction and campus novel does not soften Moss's withering take on sexism and her stark view of motherhood.
--Telegraph
Product Description
Historian Anna Bennett has a book to write. She also has an insomniac toddler, a precocious, death-obsessed seven-year-old, and a frequently absent ecologist husband who has brought them all to Colsay, a desolate island in the Hebrides, so he can count the puffins. Ferociously sleep-deprived, torn between mothering and her desire for the pleasures of work and solitude, Anna becomes haunted by the discovery of a baby's skeleton in the garden of their house. Her narrative is punctuated by letters home, written 200 years before, by May, a young, middle-class midwife desperately trying to introduce modern medicine to the suspicious, insular islanders. The lives of these two characters intersect unexpectedly in this deeply moving but also at times blackly funny story about maternal ambivalence, the way we try to control children, and about women's vexed and passionate relationship with work. Moss's second novel displays an exciting expansion of her range - showing her to be both an excellent comic writer and a novelist of great emotional depth.
