Soldier Sailor
A Novel
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3.0 • 4 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
FINALIST for the WOMEN’S PRIZE for FICTION * One of Vogue’s Best Books of the Year
Award-winning author Claire Kilroy’s “lyrical and incisive” (The New York Times Book Review) novel that reads with the pace of a thriller and is filled with astute and witty observations of life with a young child.
Soldier Sailor takes readers deep inside the early days of motherhood. Exploring the clash of fierce love with a seismic shift in identity, Claire Kilroy conjures the raw, tumultuous emotions of a new mother, as her marriage strains and she struggles with questions of equality, autonomy, and creativity.
Soldier Sailor is a tale of boundless love and relentless battle, a bedtime story to a son, Sailor, recounting their early years together. Spending her days in baby groups, playgrounds, and supermarkets, Soldier doesn’t know who she is anymore. She hardly sees her husband, who has taken to working late most nights. A chance encounter with a former colleague feels like a lifeline to the person she used to be but can hardly remember.
Tender and harrowing, Kilroy’s modern masterpiece “hums with poetry, insight, and humor...full of truths so sharp and beautiful readers will need to take a breath” (Booklist, starred review).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kilroy's gut-wrenching latest (after The Devil I Know) finds a mother, Soldier, recounting to her son, Sailor, the first few years of his life. The action moves fluidly between past and present, mimicking the out-of-time nature of early motherhood, and the immersive prose veers from lyrical ("The world rotated beneath us and we were the world") to brutal (when Sailor was whining at six months old, Soldier screamed at him to "Shut the fuck up"). Soldier also expresses resentment toward men, including her husband, for never having to go through childbirth ("Tell me, men: when were you last split open from the inside?"). At times it can be difficult to distinguish between what actually happened and Soldier's dark fantasies, such as her plan to abandon Sailor as an infant—but the novel builds to a gorgeous closing soliloquy, in which Soldier lays bare the confounding and heartbreaking reality of mothering. This is worth seeking out.
