Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2023
Still Born,Guadalupe Nettel's fourth novel,explores one of life's most consequential decisions - whether or not to have children - with her signature charm and intelligence.
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 has taken the drastic decision to be sterilized,but as time goes by Alina becomes drawn to the idea of becoming a mother.
When complications arise in Alina's pregnancy and Laura becomes attached to her neighbour's son,both women are forced to reckon with the complexity of their emotions. 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.
Publisher: Fitzcarraldo EditionsISBN: 9781913097660Dimensions: 197 x 125 mm
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'Still Born is an astonishingly elegant,intelligent,affecting novel,which has stayed in my mind from the moment I began it to long after I finished. I felt a huge sense of relief that I had encountered a work of art about ambivalence in mothering which encompassed a true authentic range of emotions and curiosities - vanity,aggression,jealousy and selfishness - with sanguine acceptance,as well as the beautiful and difficult project of giving and sustaining love which marks all our lives,mothers or otherwise.'- Megan Nolan,author of Acts of Desperation
'In Still Born,Guadalupe Nettel renders with great veracity life as it is encountered in the everyday,taking us to the heart of the only things that really matter: life,death and our relationships with others. All of these are contained in the experience of motherhood,which this novel explores and deepens.'- Annie Ernaux,author of The Years
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