Bad Art Mother centres on a young writer, Isa, trying to assemble a life—creative, maternal, sexual—without collapsing under the weight of expectation that each role be templated at all times.

The novel moves between past and present, tracing her early artistic ambitions, her relationship with her partner, and the disorienting arrival of motherhood. What gives the book its tension is the refusal to resolve those fractures into something redemptive; Preston lets Isa remain contradictory—ambitious and resentful, attentive and absent, loving and estranged—while interrogating the idea that women, particularly artists, are expected to metabolise these contradictions quietly.

It’s as much about the politics of attention and labour as it is about one life, asking what gets sacrificed, what gets deferred, and who gets to remain intact.

This is the 2023 Wakefield Press paperback reprint (first published 2022), in very good condition with only minor shelf wear and a clean interior.