Eleven Hours: A Novel Illuminating the Most Life-Altering Experience of Any Woman's Life: Pregnancy, Labour and Giving Birth - Hardcover

Pamela Erens

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1782399798 ISBN 13: 9781782399797

Publisher: Atlantic Books, 2016

Synopsis

Eleven Hours is a visceral, vital, microcosmic illumination of the most pivotal moment of any woman's life: giving birth. With taut, sensitive prose, Erens explores the lives of two women in New York - one in labour, the other her Haitian midwife - to gracefully reveal the seminal moments that have led them to meet here, now, during childbirth.

With this riveting, insightful and sometimes harrowing novel, Erens cements herself as one of modern fiction's most diverse and discerning authors.

About this title

Review:

She writes like a dream - deeply moving and utterly involving. --Deborah Moggach

Erens beautifully evokes [labour's] insistent rhythms and protective deliriums... she has also written an indelible portrait of two women coming to terms with the desire, fear, crushing losses and fragile joys that have carved their lives --New York Times Book Review

Erens evokes the layered experience of living in a body - its tides of memory, sensation, and emotion - like no other writer I know. --Karen Russell, author of SWAMPLANDIA!

Pamela Erens has given us a vital, microcosmic, fundamental, riveting, distilled illumination of our most profound and misunderstood passage... As essential a novel as they come. --Elisa Albert, author of AFTER BIRTH

Pamela Erens achieves the extraordinary... a visceral story about an intensely painful experience that manages to be an intense pleasure to read. --Boston Globe

Erens is such a gifted writer that... from the first sentence [she] seizes control of her intense, provocative and deeply rewarding high-wire act of a book. --LA Times

Erens'... writing is candid without being sensational, detailed without being clinical... [An] admirable novel. --Wall Street Journal

Pamela Erens [is] one of the most gifted fiction writers we have. This exploration of a woman's time in labor is at once gritty and graceful, harrowing and compassionate... Bravo! - Robin Black, author of LIFE DRAWING

Deeply moving and radiantly written, Eleven Hours is a gorgeous, harrowing, and intensely urgent novel. Pamela Erens is a mesmerizingly smart and powerful writer - I can't stop thinking about this book. --Molly Antopol, author of THE UNAMERICANS

Eleven Hours is taut, spare and gorgeous... - Roxana Robinson, author of SPARTA

This precisely written novel vividly evokes the immediacy, the tedium, the pain and the terror of labour. Erens' compassion for her characters - the medics as well as their patients - draws the reader close into their lives, in the way that only really good writing can do. --Jane Rogers, author of THE TESTAMENT OF JESSIE LAMB

[With] exquisite prose... this novel's greatest achievement is its excruciatingly vivid depiction of what it is to grow and carry and deliver a child... Powerful-aesthetically and viscerally. --Kirkus

Erens flawlessly captures the experience of childbirth in Eleven Hours - the fear, the surprise, the other-worldly pain. --Chicago Review of Books

The book is fierce and vivid in its depiction of the exhaustion of the spirit and the rending of the flesh during childbirth... a tough and emotionally authentic story. --NPR

Extremely compelling... surprising and intimate. Bottom line: Women are heroes.

--CupOfJo.com

From the Author:

Pamela Erens' short fiction, reviews and essays have appeared in a wide variety of literary, cultural, and mainstream publications, including the New York Times, Vogue, Elle, Salon, Tin House, Boston Review, and New England Review. For many years Pamela was an editor at Glamour magazine.

About this edition

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1782399798
• ISBN 13: 9781782399797
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 176