Still Born

By: Guadalupe Nettel

Narrated by: Rachel Schwab

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, Still Born explores maternal ambivalence with a surgeon’s touch, carefully dissecting the contradictions that make up the lived experiences of women.

Shortlisted, The International Booker Prize, 2023

©2020 Guadalupe Nettel (P)2023 Bloomsbury Publishing LLC

Critic reviews

‘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

‘Guadalupe Nettel reminds us that there is nothing stranger than our existence lived in containers of meat, blood and madness.’

— Mariana Enríquez, author of The Dangers of Smoking in Bed

‘I love the work of Guadalupe Nettel, one of Mexico’s greatest living writers. Her fiction is brilliant and original, always suffused with sensuality and strange science.’

— Paul Theroux, author of The Mosquito Coast

Pronunciation

A poor start, where the title was pronounced as ‘stillborn’ - the novel is so significantly entitled ‘Still Born’. The difference in meaning is material to the book.