May 2025
I thought I would go with another Mother’s in May theme this month. We must just be so interested in the mother/ child relationship because goodness there is a surfeit of novels about it!!
Have you read Sally Hepworth’s The Mother-in-Law? I love her novels, fast, snappy and twisty! This one is one of my favourites, a dead mother-in-law, but how? There is a suicide note but everyone in this family is lying and hiding something.
I just read and loved Jane Caro’s Lyrebird, but it is in The Mother that we see the mother/ daughter relationship investigated…what wouldn’t you do for your daughter? Hopefully not as much as this mother would.
When I picked up Because I’m Not Myself, You See I wasn’t expecting anything really- it was a Dymocks Book of the Month, but I ended up buying it and reading it cover to cover. Soon after giving birth to her first child Ariane Beeston experienced breaks from reality, complete with dragons. As a psychologist she kept these experiences quiet until she couldn’t and the book goes from there. I found this memoir just so engrossing; often funny and important.
I adore Ann Patchett, and love Tom Lake. This is set in the pandemic, but don’t let that stop you. Grown daughters’ home and safe, lots of dinners and conversation. It examines that love between mother and daughter, married love and first love. This is one of my favourites, I just love it.
My niece introduced me to Katrina Nannestad, whose books are sweet, heart wrenching middle grade fiction. In The Girl, the Dog and the Writer series Freja's thrusted into Tobias’ life (he is the writers, a more absent-minded sweetheart you’ll never read) because her mother Clementine is sick. This is a book about their adventures in Rome, but for me what shines is the mother daughter love.