Night Waking - Softcover

Moss, Sarah

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1847082157 ISBN 13: 9781847082152

Publisher: Granta Books, 2011

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review:

'Sarah Moss writes the kind of books that are difficult to put down' --Louise Welch, Financial Times

`Moss writes marvellously (and often hilariously). Alison Pearson for intellectuals' --The Times

'Tartly humorous, sad and clever ... a passionately written meditation on motherhood' --Sunday Times

'fresh and illuminating' --Guardian

`Moss's second novel is set to cement her reputation as one of contemporary fiction's brightest stars'
--Stylist

'Tightly plotted, brilliantly observed ... Sarah Moss writes the kind of books that are difficult to put down' --Louise Welch, Financial Times

`Moss writes marvellously (and often hilariously) about the clash between career and motherhood. Alison Pearson for intellectuals' --The Times

'Moss threads historical research into her fiction in a way that is fresh and illuminating' --Guardian

'An original and accomplished novel' --Daily Mail

`Tartly humorous, sad and clever ... a passionately written meditation on motherhood, with all the monotony and visceral feelings faithfully recorded'
--Sunday Times

About the Author:

Sarah Moss is a lecturer of English and American Literature at the University of Kent. She spent 2009-10 as a visiting lecturer at the University of Reykavik. She co-edits, with Nicola Humble, the Food series at Manchester University Press, and has a BA, MSc. and DPhil from Oxford University. Night Waking is her second novel.

About this edition

• Publisher: Granta Books
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1847082157
• ISBN 13: 9781847082152
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 386