Motherhood: A Novel [9781250214782]

Overview

Shortlisted for the Giller Prize
Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, New York Magazine, Vulture (#1 of 2018), NPR, Financial Times, The Times Literary Supplement, Chicago Tribune, Bustle, Lit Hub, Refinery29, Bookforum, and Top Shelf

“Sheila Heti’s book seems likely to become the defining literary work on the subject . . . It’s hard to do justice to its complexity. This is less a book than a tapestry—a finely wrought work of delicate art.”
—The Guardian

From the author of How Should a Person Be? comes a daring novel about whether or not to have children.

In Motherhood, Sheila Heti asks what is gained and what is lost when a woman becomes a mother, treating the most consequential decision of early adulthood with the candor, originality, and humor that have won Heti international acclaim and made How Should A Person Be? required reading for a generation.

In her late thirties, when her friends are asking when they will become mothers, the narrator of Heti’s intimate and urgent novel considers whether she will do so at all. In a narrative spanning several years, casting among the influence of her peers, partner, and her duties to her forbearers, she struggles to make a wise and moral choice. After seeking guidance from philosophy, her body, mysticism, and chance, she discovers her answer much closer to home.

Motherhood is a courageous, keenly felt, and starkly original novel that will surely spark lively conversations about womanhood, parenthood, and about how—and for whom—to live.