Motherhood

**A Daily Telegraph, Financial Times, Irish Times, Refinery29, TLS and The White Review Book of the Year 2018**

A provocative novel about the desire and duty to procreate, from the author of the critically acclaimed How Should A Person Be?

Motherhood treats one of the most consequential decisions of early adulthood - whether or not to have children - with the intelligence, wit and originality that have won Sheila Heti international acclaim.

Having reached an age when most of her peers are asking themselves when they will become mothers, Heti's narrator considers, with the same urgency, whether she will do so at all. Over the course of several years, under the influence of her partner, body, family, friends, mysticism and chance, she struggles to make a moral and meaningful choice.

In a compellingly direct mode that straddles the forms of the novel and the essay, Motherhood raises radical and essential questions about womanhood, parenthood, and how - and for whom - to live.

'Likely to become the defining literary work on the subject' Guardian

" Motherhood confronts the philosophical questions raised by childbearing and womanhood... Heti continues the project of How Should a Person Be? in at least one way: by opening out seemingly individual experiences into a general inquiry about ways of being...as concerned with art as it is with mothering... Heti’s narrator wants to create - specifically, to create something that will honour the memory of her mother and grandmother… Motherhood both documents that desire and fulfils it."

Sheila Heti