Still Born by Nettel, Guadalupe

ISBN: 1639730036

Author: Nettel, Guadalupe

Condition: new

Shortlisted for the 2023 International Booker PrizeChosen as a New Yorker Best Book of 2023A profound novel about motherhood, friendship, and the power of community from one of the leading lights in contemporary Latin American literature (Valeria Luiselli, author of Lost Children Archive).Alina and Laura are independent and career-driven women in their mid-thirties, neither of whom have built their future around the prospect of a family. Laura is so determined not to become a mother that she has taken the drastic decision to have her tubes tied. But when she announces this to her friend, she learns that Alina has made the opposite decision and is preparing to have a child of her own.Alinas pregnancy shakes the womens lives, first creating distance and then a remarkable closeness between them. When Alinas daughter survives childbirth - after a diagnosis that predicted the opposite - and Laura becomes attached to her neighbors son, both women are forced to reckon with the complexity of their emotions, their needs, and the needs of the people who are dependent upon them.In prose that is as gripping as it is insightful, Guadalupe Nettel explores maternal ambivalence with a surgeons touch, carefully dissecting the contradictions that make up the lived experiences of women.