Still Born
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
Bloomsbury presents Still Born by Guadalupe Nettel, read by Rachel Schwab.
Shortlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize
A 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.
Alina's pregnancy shakes the women's lives, first creating distance and then a remarkable closeness between them. When Alina's daughter survives childbirth – after a diagnosis that predicted the opposite – and Laura becomes attached to her neighbor's 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 surgeon's touch, carefully dissecting the contradictions that make up the lived experiences of women.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
We were haunted by this quietly stunning novel about motherhood and the women who choose it, reject it, or lose it. Mexico City doctoral student Laura has chosen not to have children, a decision supported by her closest friend, Alina. When Alina decides to pursue motherhood herself, a serious complication threatens the pregnancy, drawing both women into the messy emotional reality of what they thought they wanted. Author Guadalupe Nettel sets these deeply personal stories against a constant hum of fear and instability. As Laura bonds with her struggling single-mom neighbour, Doris, and her young son, Nico, it becomes clear how motherhood is shaped by violence, inequality, and the fragility of everyday life. Narrator Rachel Schwab’s quiet control pulls us deep into Laura’s interior life and makes the story’s complex emotions feel even more intimate and real. Still Born is a novel that asks what it means to care for others in an uncertain world.
