A cool, searching novel about motherhood, inheritance and grief.

The narrator is pregnant, then a mother, while thinking through the death of her own mother, the pressure of lineage, and the history of scientific attempts to see beneath the surface: X-rays, psychoanalysis, anatomy, diagnosis, observation. 

Formally, it sits somewhere between fiction, essay and intellectual memoir, moving through figures including Wilhelm Röntgen, Freud, Anna Freud and John Hunter without becoming a straightforward historical novel. Greengrass is interested in the way knowledge promises mastery but often produces a deeper unease: the more we see, the less simple the self becomes. For readers of Rachel Cusk, Jenny Offill, Olivia Laing, Maggie Nelson, Siri Hustvedt, Deborah Levy, motherhood literature, body writing, medical history, and fiction that thinks without becoming bloodless.

John Murray paperback. First published in paperback in 2019; originally published in 2018. Good second-hand condition, with light handling wear and minor edge/corner wear.