Still Born

De: Guadalupe Nettel, Rosalind Harvey - translator

Narrado por: Rachel Schwab

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.

©2023 Guadalupe Nettel and Rosalind Harvey (P)2023 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Heartwarming and heartbreaking!

This was a beautiful story with endearing characters. Many complicated layers in each persons life. I loved it.

Good writing, bad story

I really enjoyed this authors writing style but couldn't get past the massive amount of hatred she puts on "breeders" for being "slaves if the patriarchy". I have no issues at all with women who choose to have children or women who chose to have no children, women who chose to marry or women who chose not to marry. Feminism is supposed to be about the ability to make your own choices and have the power to do what you want. Ckearly the author thinks that in order to be a feminist you have to be single and childless. I also couldn't buy any of the thought process of Alina after the birth of her daughter. None of it read as realistic to me. I liked her style but not this book.

The title

I did enjoy the book, I just didn’t think it would leave off on a cliffhanger almost.