MOTHERHOOD
by Sheila Heti
Motherhood was named the Best Book of the Year by New York magazine. It was a New York Times Critics Pick of 2018, and chosen as a Best Book of the Year by the Times Literary Supplement, The Globe and Mail, The Chicago Tribune, Bookforum and other places. It was shortlisted for the Giller Prize in Canada. Elena Ferrante named it one of her favourite books by a female author.
It has been translated into Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovene, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish.
Listen to an interview about the book on Between the Covers, and on the podcast Longform.
Read reviews of the book by Sally Rooney in The London Review of Books, by Lara Feigl in The Guardian, by Adam Kirsch in The Atlantic, by Dwight Gardner in The New York Times, and by Lauren Oyler in The Baffler.
PRAISE FOR MOTHERHOOD
"This inquiry into the modern woman’s moral, social and psychological relationship to procreation is an illumination, a provocation, and a response—finally—to the new norms of femininity, formulated from the deepest reaches of female intellectual authority. It is unlike anything else I’ve read. Sheila Heti has broken new ground, both in her maturity as an artist and in the possibilities of the female discourse itself." - Rachel Cusk
"The book Sheila Heti’s Motherhood reminds me of the most is Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, except that the agonizing decision is whether to create a child, and not whether to destroy one—but it’s that good, and that crazy-making. I’ve never seen anyone write about the relationship between childlessness, writing, and mother’s sadnesses the way Sheila Heti does. I know Motherhood is going to mean a lot to many different people—fully as much so as if it was a human that Sheila gave birth to—though in a different and in fact incommensurate way. That’s just one of many paradoxes that are not shied away from in this courageous, necessary, visionary book." - Elif Batuman
"Reading this beautiful novel, I felt I was watching a brilliant mind invent new tools for thinking. Sheila Heti wrings revelation from the act of asking, again and again, in ever more challenging and innovative ways, impossible questions of existence. Motherhood is a thrilling, very funny, and almost unbearably moving book.” - Garth Greenwell
"I deeply enjoyed Sheila Heti's fractal, meticulous, and twinklingly self-aware book—in which every part seemed to know, and be informed by, every other part—about art and time and change and books and babies. Motherhood synergistically functions both as an intimate, moving, autobiographical novel and as a practical, mysterious, five-year tool used by its protagonist to help her contemplate and answer central questions in her life. I think of Motherhood as a beautiful, natural, living thing—a rare tree in the car-filled parking lot of literature, offering aesthetic and sustainable pleasures while also bristling with multiple, helpful, compassionate functions in the world. The high stakes, complexity, intensity, playfulness, seriousness, and inter-dimensionality of Motherhood's synthesis of art and life, of the imagination and the universe, makes me excited about both life and literature. I recommend reading and rereading Motherhood." - Tao Lin
"With each of her novels, Sheila Heti invents a new novel form. Motherhood is a riveting story of love and fate, a powerful inspiration to reflect, and a subtle depiction of the lives of contemporary women and men, by an exceptional artist in the prime of her powers. Motherhood constitutes its own genre within the many-faceted novel of ideas. Heti is like no one else." - Mark Greif
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