Synopses & Reviews
From the winner of the Orange Award for New Writers, an epic novel of childbirthpast, present, and future The year is 1865. In Vienna, Dr. Ignasz Semmelweiss has been hounded into an asylum by his medical peers, ridiculed for his claim that doctors unwashed hands are the root cause of childbed fever. In present-day London, Bridget Hughes juggles her young son, husband, and mother as she plans her home birth, unprepared for the trial she is about to endure. Somewhere in 2135, in a world where humans are birthed and raised in breeding farms, Prisoner 730004 is on trial for concealing a pregnancy.
Through three stories spanning centuries, acclaimed novelist Joanna Kavenna explores the most basic plight of women, from the slaughterhouse of primitive medicine to a futurisic vision of technological oppression. Poised at the midpoint is Bridget, whose fervent belief in the wisdom of nature is tested in one of the most gripping accounts of labor to appear in fiction.
Original, powerful, and played out against a vast canvas, The Birth of Love is at once a novel about the creation of human life, science and faith, madness and compromise, and the epic journey of motherhood.
Joanna Kavennas first novel, Inglorious, received the prestigious Orange Award for debut fiction, while The Ice Museum, a work of travel writing, was short-listed for the Ondaatje Prize. Kavennas writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, and The Times Literary Supplement, among other publications. She lives in Oxford, England.
The year is 1865. In Vienna, Dr. Ignasz Semmelweiss has been hounded into an asylum by his medical peers, ridiculed for his claim that doctors unwashed hands are the root cause of childbed fever. In present-day London, Bridget Hughes juggles her young son, husband, and mother as she plans her home birth, unprepared for the trial she is about to endure. Somewhere in 2135, in a world where humans are birthed and raised in breeding farms, Prisoner 730004 is on trial for concealing a pregnancy.
Through three stories spanning centuries, acclaimed novelist Joanna Kavenna explores the most basic plight of women, from the slaughterhouse of primitive medicine to a futurisic vision of technological oppression. Poised at the midpoint is Bridget, whose fervent belief in the wisdom and beauty of nature is tested in Kavenna's three accounts of labor.
Original, powerful, and played out against a vast canvas, The Birth of Love is at once a novel about the creation of human life, science and faith, madness and compromise, and the journey of motherhood. "Driven, risked and achieved, The Birth of Love is shaped with rare accomplished and integrity. Shifts of register alarm and excite. But Joanna Kavenna's cool and measured control wins our trust, carrying us, in the heat of the matter, through circuits of pain and disquiet, to beautiful resolution."Iain Sinclair, author of Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire
"Procreation in three disparate centuries and societies is the primal subject of a prize-winning British writer's original second novel. Kavenna (Inglorious, 2007) creates an unusual structure for the book, establishing four different narrative strands and visiting each twice as she traces the urges, dangers, mythologies, moods and supreme force of childbirth across time. In a mid-19th-century Viennese mental asylum, deranged Professor Semmelweis babbles about a massacre of women, meaning the victims of puerperal fever infected by ignorant doctors passing germs from the dead to the living. Is this episode in fact an excerpt from The Moon, a novel about Semmelweis and the mythic mother written by 21st-century author and social outsider Michael Stone? Another of the book's contemporary characters is heavily pregnant Brigid Hayes, who is juggling her toddler, her mother and her chaotic feelings while she undergoes an increasingly brutal labor. Meanwhile, in 2153, prisoners 730004, 5 and 6 speak of a totalitarian society on a ruined planet Earth, where the species is generated from harvested eggs and sperm. Yet even here the essential cycle of life defies suppression. Moving smoothly among gothic, naturalistic and futuristic modes and cross-connecting strands and ideas, Kavenna displays technical dexterity while offering a textured assessment-from the corporeal to the cerebral-of a totemic subject. Surprisingly affecting."Kirkus Reviews
"Orange Awardwinning (for Inglorious) Kavenna's latest is a complex and expansive narrative about childbirth, encompassing that singular event's mysteries, dramas, attendant sciences, and politics, over a span of more than three centuries. Vienna, 1865: Professor Ignaz Semmelweis is committed to an asylum, disturbed by visions of the women who died of childbed fever while he was an obstetrician and his failed crusade to root out the illness' cause. London, 2009: Brigid Hayes, a devoted wife and mother, awaits the imminent birth of her second child, while across town Michael Stone, after innumerable attempts, finally gets a novel published and struggles to handle the sudden public exposure. Unknown location, 2153: prisoner 730004 stands trial for conspiring against the Protectors, leaders of a dystopian society in which all human activity, including procreation, is regulated for the preservation of the species . . . Her writing is sharp, her four narrative voices are nuanced and distinctive, and her emotional, intellectual and stylistic ranges are impressive."Publishers Weekly
"Kavenna (Inglorious) writes about the power and pain of childbirth in four interconnected stories. 'The Moon' takes place in 1865 Vienna, where a certain Professor Semmelweis is in an insane asylum crazed by the belief that he and his colleagues are responsible for hundreds of women dying of childbed fever. 'The Empress' is set in present-day London, where Brigid struggles to withstand the excruciating labor of her second child in order to experience natural childbirth. 'The Hermit', also set in present-day London, features Michael Stone, a troubled, isolated writer of many unpublished books who has finally found success with his novel, The Moon, about the 19th-century doctor Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis, who fought for sanitary birthing conditions to combat puerperal fever. And, last, in 'The Tower', where the year is 2025, the human species has almost been destroyed and is now controlled by the Protectors, who use soul-crushing, overly sanitized methods in an attempt to promulgate the species once more. Highly symbolic and wonderfully suspenseful, Kavenna's distinctive voices from the past, present, and future join to proclaim the wonder of birth."Joy Humphrey, Pepperdine Univ. Law Lib., Malibu, CA, Library Journal
Synopsis
From the winner of the Orange Award for New Writers, an epic novel of childbirth—past, present, and future The year is 1865. In Vienna, Dr. Ignasz Semmelweiss has been hounded into an asylum by his medical peers, ridiculed for his claim that doctors unwashed hands are the root cause of childbed fever. In present-day London, Bridget Hughes juggles her young son, husband, and mother as she plans her home birth, unprepared for the trial she is about to endure. Somewhere in 2135, in a world where humans are birthed and raised in breeding farms, Prisoner 730004 is on trial for concealing a pregnancy.
Through three stories spanning centuries, acclaimed novelist Joanna Kavenna explores the most basic plight of women, from the slaughterhouse of primitive medicine to a futurisic vision of technological oppression. Poised at the midpoint is Bridget, whose fervent belief in the wisdom of nature is tested in one of the most gripping accounts of labor to appear in fiction.
Original, powerful, and played out against a vast canvas, The Birth of Love is at once a novel about the creation of human life, science and faith, madness and compromise, and the epic journey of motherhood.
About the Author
Joanna Kavennas first novel, Inglorious, received the prestigious Orange Award for debut fiction, while The Ice Museum, a work of travel writing, was short-listed for the Ondaatje Prize. Kavennas writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, and The Times Literary Supplement, among other publications. She lives in Oxford, England.