- Published: 03/06/2021
- ISBN: 9781783787685
- Granta Books
- 384 pages
Night Waking
Sarah Moss
Historian Anna Bennett has a book to write. She also has an insomniac toddler, a precocious, death-obsessed seven-year-old, and a frequently absent ecologist husband who has brought them all to Colsay, a desolate island in the Hebrides, so he can count the puffins. Ferociously sleep-deprived, torn between mothering and her desire for the pleasures of work and solitude, Anna becomes haunted by the discovery of a baby’s skeleton in the garden of their house. Her narrative is punctuated by letters home, written 200 years before, by May, a young, middle-class midwife desperately trying to introduce modern medicine to the suspicious, insular islanders. The lives of these two characters intersect unexpectedly in this deeply moving but also at times blackly funny story about maternal ambivalence, the way we try to control children, and about women’s vexed and passionate relationship with work. Moss’s second novel displays an exciting expansion of her range – showing her to be both an excellent comic writer and a novelist of great emotional depth.
£9.99
Tartly humorous, sad and clever ... a passionately written meditation on motherhood, with all the monotony, desperation and visceral feelings faithfully recorded
Elizabeth Buchan, Sunday Times
Moss writes marvellously (and often hilariously) about the clash between career and motherhood. Allison Pearson for intellectuals
Kate Saunders, The Times
Fresh and illuminating... [Sarah] Moss is a wry, winning guide
Guardian
From the Same Author
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In Conversation
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Two Ireland-based writers discussing national identity, disappointing holidays and art deco china.
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Ghost Wall
Sarah Moss
An excerpt from Sarah Moss's Ghost Wall, published by Granta Books.
Fiction | The Online Edition
things that didn’t happen
Sarah Moss
‘Suddenly, your heart began; suddenly in the darkness of your mother’s womb there was a crackle and a flash and out of nothing, the current began to run.’