I felt like I was learning something as I read. It deals with post natal depression, post partum psychosis and infanticide so is understandably hard hitting and a difficult read in some places.Īside from the main narrative I was equally impressed with the nuggets of information about subjects relating to motherhood which were expertly weaved in. You know I’m a complete sucker for books about motherhood and this one digs deep into what it means to be a mother and how much of yourself as an individual you have to relinquish to become a ‘good mother’. It gave me real Leila Slimani, Lullaby vibes. It is a roasting hot day and the atmosphere is dripping with tension. This book opened in such a way that it had me gripped from the first few pages! The opening scene is one where the nanny of the twins is returning home to find the dead bodies and Alice nonchalantly sitting in a chair. She also attends the trial of the Alice and begins to piece together what actually happened and weigh up her own feelings with the feelings of the public and the jury. She becomes slightly obsessed with Alice and the motivation behind the murder, using her savings to fund her writing project and putting her own baby into nursery care to get the job done. The narrator then decides to take a sabbatical from her job to write another novel, this time about the murders. This is a huge news story for a while, filled with public outrage but the narrator turns her attentions away from it until she is in labour herself and suddenly remembers in a moment of revelation that she knew the woman concerned, Jade (now Alice) briefly many years ago.

The unnamed narrator (first person perspective) is a writer of a very successful true crime novel and is pregnant with her first child when she hears that a woman has murdered her twin babies, drowning them in the bathtub.

Mothers Don’t tells the stories of two women who are new mothers. I came to get my hands on a copy due to the keen eye of my bookish Two Fond Of Books partner in crime Clare Mothers Don’t by Katixa Agirre (translated from the Basque by Kristin Addis) is one of the lead titles of new indie publisher 3TimesRebel who are dedicated to publishing books by women in minority languages. Oh my goodness! This book! I’m writing this review having just closed the book after tearing through it in about 4 hours flat.