Buchi Emecheta "The Joys of Motherhood". Go to school. Get high grades. Go to university. Find a good job. Start a company. Find a partner. Have kids. Take out a mortgage. Don’t forget to save for your retirement. Sleep well. Eat well. Exercise. Meditate. Maintain friendships. Nurture a hobby. After doing all this, can you still imagine yourself dying alone on the side of the road? That is exactly what happens to Nnu Ego She did everything right. She followed all Ibo traditio

Nicolas Padamsee "England is mine". David is a shy, timid, painfully unoutspoken teenager trying to figure out his life. Most of the time, he simply disappears into the music of his favourite artist, Karl Williams, because real life offers little competition. He lives between two worlds: his very middle-class, emotionally correct mother’s house, and his very working-class, proudly trashy father’s home, where keeping dirty dishes in the bedroom for days is not a problem but a

Shalom Auslander "Mother for dinner". Seventh did his best to run away from his family - its traditions, narratives, and even personal connections. However, when Mudd, Seventh’s mother, dies, the time comes for all the siblings to gather one last time. Mudd, cruel and unbendable as ever, demands one final wish before anyone can receive their inheritance. According to the ancient tradition of the Cannibals, they have to Eat her . Literally. Mudd, the gatekeeper of all Cannibal

Suzumi Suzuki "Gifted". Gifted claims to be a story about a mother–daughter relationship at an intense crossroads in their lives. The mother is dying; the daughter, who works in Tokyo’s entertainment district, quits her job to spend time with her. That framing sets the bar very high. One would reasonably expect tense conversations, long-buried arguments, revelations about shared past. At the very least, the novel could offer insight into Tokyo’s underbelly or into how elderl

Shady Lewis "On the Greenwich line". Service User A lives in a mouldy, badly ventilated basement hotel ( read dormitory) room. She is 65 and has not seen anything an average person would call a “decent life” since the day she was born. Still, the unnamed housing officer, whose job it is to assess whether Service User A qualifies for urgent permanent accommodation, calmly concludes the following: “Nothing about the case caught my eye. It contained the usual mix of trauma, lang

Natalia Ginzburg "Sagittarius". For women the first half is preloaded with obligations: be a good daughter, a tolerable wife, and naturally - a mother. Biology and society clap politely while they ticks the boxes. And then, unexpectedly, the list runs out. Young enough to hope, solvent enough to try Natalia Ginzburg tells a story of such a woman, firmly planted in the “second half” of her life. She has money to spend, time to waste, and an explosive amount of energy to finall

Yuko Tsushima "Territory of light". Territory of Light  is a novel about single motherhood in 1970s Japan. Its narrator, recently abandoned by her husband, recounts the first year in a new apartment she shares with her young daughter. The book is praised for its unflinching portrayal of motherhood, loneliness, and the quiet violence of a rigid society that expects women to endure rather than resist. But hovering in the shadows of this story is a character who deserves far mor