Synopses & Reviews
Review
Tartly humorous, sad and clever ... a passionately written meditation on motherhood, with all the monotony, desperation and visceral feelings faithfully recorded - Elizabeth Buchan,
Sunday Times
Moss writes marvellously (and often hilariously) about the clash between career and motherhood. Allison Pearson for intellectuals - The Times
Fresh and illuminating... [Sarah] Moss is a wry, winning guide - Guardian
Highly enjoyable... The upbeat conclusion to this blend of middle-class satire, historical fiction and campus novel does not soften Moss's withering take on sexism and her stark view of motherhood - Daily Telegraph
An original and accomplished novel - Daily Mail
Sarah Moss's debut, Cold Earth, was a stylish thriller set on a remote archaeological dig in Greenland. Here she takes the emotional isolation of early parenthood as her subject, intensifying the experience by transplanting a young family to a remote Scottish island ... In her previous book, a character noted that there was ""some peace in having a kind of room of my own, even if it is a grave."" This latest work explores the concept further with some startling results' - Independent
Sarah Moss weaves in perceptions about motherhood, attitudes to children and attempts to improve the world... she demonstrates that she can handle a darkly comic narrative with the best of them - although Night Waking is much more than that - Metro
Witty with dark humour ... Moss manages to wave the threads together quite expertly at the end - Herald
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.
Synopsis
The swans are by the shore, drifting bright as paper cutouts
against waves blurred by dusk. They spend the night
murmuring oboe harmonies to each other, a woodwind of
reassurance. Ordinary swans, the Queens swans on the river
where we feed the ducks at home, have faces apparently
afflicted by some medieval disease, and sleep standing on one
leg, heads under their wings like child-free passengers on
long-haul flights who can summon night with a nylon blindfold.
These sea swans seem to stay awake all night, sailing
through the fading light like ships bound for far countries, and
they have faces as smooth and neutral as the corps de ballet, faces
that cant communicate any level of grief or pain. Perhaps this
is an asset in species that mate for life.
I glance back at the house. Its façade, dark as the cliff-face
at the other end of the island, turns away from the after-light
shining over the sea, from where America is coming up for a
new day as we turn away from the sun. One of the swans
stretches towards the sky and cries out, wings threshing the water
in sudden agitation like that of someone who has just remembered
that a friend is dead. I saw a goose dying, once, a Canada
goose that had flown all the way from the Arctic to end its life on
the hard shoulder of the M40, and although one wing was still
beating as if to music while the other lay across the rumble-strip,
its face was impassive. I stood on the footbridge, watching, joggling
the pram in which the baby would sleep only for as long
as we kept moving, until some lorry driver, merciful or inattentive,
left a flurry of feathers and red jam on the road. Our swans
are safe from that, here. For a season. Like us, they will go south
in the autumn, but for now there are no cars, no roads. No
bridges, either. The stars are coming out in the darkening sky
over the hill. I shiver; not cold, exactly, but time to go in.
About the Author
Devon, United Kingdom