A very difficult read about motherhood, but one that centres the oft "shooshed" voices on the subject.

The novel follows a woman who has long decided not to have children, set against the parallel story of her closest friend, whose experience of pregnancy and birth is shaped by medical crisis and uncertainty. Nettel places the pair in careful proximity, examining how choice, care, and responsibility are lived through these two starkly different experiences.

What emerges is a skirting of ideology and instead direct attention to human attention, to ambivalence, to fear, to love without script.