mothers an essay on love and cruelty pdf free

Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty PDF

A simple argument guides this book: motherhood is the place in our culture where we lodge, or rather bury, the reality of our own conflicts. By making mothers the objects of both licensed idealization and cruelty, we blind ourselves to the world’s iniquities and shut down the portals of the heart. Mothers are the ultimate scapegoat for our personal and political failings, for everything that is wrong with the world, which becomes their task (unrealizable, of course) to repair. Moving commandingly between pop cultural references such as Roald Dahl’s Matilda to insights on motherhood in the ancient world and the contemporary stigmatization of single mothers, Jacqueline Rose delivers a groundbreaking report into something so prevalent we hardly notice. Mothers is an incisive, rousing call to action from one of our most important contemporary thinkers....

Chapter List (30 chapters):

• Chapter 1: Mothers
• Chapter 2: Title Page
• Chapter 3: Copyright Notice
• Chapter 4: Dedication
• Chapter 5: Epigraphs
• Chapter 6: Opening
• Chapter 7: 1. Social Punishment
• Chapter 8: Now
• Chapter 9: Then
• Chapter 10: 2. Psychic Blindness
• Chapter 11: Loving
• Chapter 12: Hating
• Chapter 13: 3. The Agony and the Ecstasy
• Chapter 14: Elena Ferrante
• Chapter 15: Inside Out
• Chapter 16: Coda
• Chapter 17: Acknowledgements
• Chapter 18: Notes
• Chapter 19: Notes 1
• Chapter 20: Notes 2
• Chapter 21: Notes 3
• Chapter 22: Notes 4
• Chapter 23: Notes 5
• Chapter 24: Notes 6
• Chapter 25: Index
• Chapter 26: Permissions Acknowledgements
• Chapter 27: Also by Jacqueline Rose
• Chapter 28: A Note About the Author
• Chapter 29: Newsletter Sign-up
• Chapter 30: Copyright

Rate & write a review

Similar documents.

Embriologija - Nikolić

General Construction Engineering

Why Christians Will Suffer \"Great Tribulation\": The Sequel to the End Times Passover

A Importância Da Reforma Tributária

Pre-Handwriting Practice, Grades PK - 1: A Complete “First” Handwriting Program for Young and Special Learners

A progressividade como meio de realização da justiça fiscal e social e os empecilhos para sua inclusão na reforma tributária do Brasil

جديد على كرسي الادارة - النجاح في الأيام المئة الأولى

Christians and Suffering

Tarzan, a dzsungel fia

Responsabilidad Social Empresarial: Competividad y casos de buenas prácticas en Pymes

Noções de Direito Tributário Municipal: um guia da teoria à prática

غسيل الدماغ: علم التحكم بالتفكير

Minus 2/3 – The Invisible Flash: Crafting Light for Photographers in the Field

Getting Rid Of Bradley

Mars istenei

Popular uploaders.

• Marco Aurélio Ayres Lima
• Beatriz Otero Biancato
• كاثلين تيلر
• Gerd Ludwig
• Joshua Johnson
• NATHANIAL BLACKWOOD
• Luiz Carlos de Cesaro Cavaler
• Lirio Schaeffer
• Tamzin Merchant
• Francis M. Fisher
• Nicole Böhm
• Sol Angel Ducasa
• Kelley Keehn
• Kathey J.Crisler
• Aaaron Campbell
• Thaddeus P. Collier
• Rosalind Miles
• Juahrez Alves
• Raymond Tolman
• Jesús Sánchez Cotobal
• Dúnia Mira Hernández
• James Fitzgerald
• Enrico Beretta
• Gloria Vana
• Olivia Rose
• Aurora Florbella
• Andrea Reeves Walters
• Karen S. Walch

Conversations across the medical humanities

Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty – Book Review

What does the figure of the mother evoke in us? How does an engagement with this figure expose the persistence of colonial logics and global inequalities? Yianna Liatsos reviews Mothers by Jacqueline Rose.

In our current pandemic social imagination the fantasy of the domestic sanctuary and the idyllic family life it contains is steadily unravelling. From the more serious headlines about the rise of domestic abuse, to the comic relief of tiktok videos depicting before-and-after-Covid snapshots of heterosexual cis women working from home while mothering offspring and husbands alike, there is a growing recognition that our current health crisis, like all past crises, has a disproportionately adverse effect on the lives of women. This, at least, is how the story of mothers circulates in the Global North, implying that Covid is an interruption of an otherwise steady reality where women live “normal lives” that are less stressful or desperate. Like many of the texts on motherhood that flooded the market in pre-Covid times, Jacqueline Rose’s book Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty dispels the myth of this normalcy on several levels, by concentrating on the damaging affective load that mothers are made to carry.

“Mother is, in Western discourse” Rose writes on the opening page of her book,

the place in our culture where we lodge, or rather bury, the reality of our own conflicts, of what it means to be fully human. It is the ultimate scapegoat for our own personal and political failings, for everything that is wrong with the world, which it becomes the task—unrealisable, of course—of mothers to repair. (1)

The gist of Rose’s argument is that there are two types of guilt that plague Western motherhood (discourse) and mothering (practice): there is the guilt the mother feels over never managing to uphold the ideal that is projected onto her by an ever-resilient and adaptable patriarchy, with its penchant for standing guard over social norms; and there is the guilt that the mother herself absorbs and embodies when, in spite of her intimate familiarity with a tragic past, she takes on the romance of motherhood, thus “inscribing her denial of history, her own flight from suffering, across the body and mind of her child” (183). For Rose, both types of guilt are associated with cultural norms that result in suffering—the former internalised by the individual mother, the latter transmitted from mother to daughter across family genealogies. The book, which is divided into 3 parts—“Social Punishment,” “Psychic Blindness” and “The Agony and the Ecstasy”— elaborates this insight through different textual and sociohistorical foci. We follow Rose’s readings of Elena Ferrante, Sindiwe Magona, Toni Morrison, Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath, Simone De Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf,  William Shakespeare, and Euripides, among others, as well as her reflections on motherhood in Ancient Greece and Rome, in the United States of Black Lives Matter, in the Brexit-pursuing UK, in post-war Naples, in one-child policy China, and in post-apartheid South Africa.

The mix of topics is dazzling and the writing is beautiful, consistent with Rose’s typical lyrical and moving expression. The book’s bookending chapters (“Now” and “Inside Out”), where Rose respectively discusses the plight of refugees in Europe and the transmission of intergenerational trauma in her own family, stand out as the most hard-hitting regarding both the agonies and the stalemates they describe. In the first chapter, Rose addresses how right-wing elements of the British media have piggybacked on news about the refugee crisis and unaccompanied minors in the Calais Jungle, to foster xenophobia by demonising foreign women. A particular favourite scapegoat is the black African woman, who is represented as coming to the UK in pursuit of “health tourism,” giving birth in Britain to take advantage of the NHS and subsequent child allowance scheme. Rose notes how in spite of British charities reporting that hundreds of pregnant foreigners avoid antenatal care at their peril, precisely from fear of being reported to the Home Office, the derogatory stereotypes of illegal foreigners as a scourge on the national economy, culture and welfare have continue unabated. To the Niobes and Virgin Marys of the world, adored suffering mothers whose torment is redemptive precisely because it is seen to be born of misfortune rather than injustice, Rose counterposes these mothers who are depicted in the right-wing media as aggressively and cunningly defying borders and laws alike. Rose describes these subversive motherly figures as embodying the unsettling arrival of the proverbial chickens coming home to roost, an un-homely return for the willfully amnesiac West, whose historical consciousness is as vacant as its museums are full with evidence of the cost at which its riches have been had. Rose’s suggestion that “Motherhood can, and should, be one of the central means through which a historical moment reckons with itself” (17), stands out for me as one of the most compelling observations her book makes, precisely because it reads women’s generative power as a visceral instinct that anarchically exposes persisting global inequalities and unpaid historical debts.

In her concluding chapter, Rose turns to her own domestic archive to go further back in history and describe how traumatic memories have haunted her own family across generations, thus inadvertently echoing Marianne Hirsch’s writings on the affective charge of postmemory.  We read about her maternal grandmother surviving Chelmno extermination camp in the Second World War; her mother denied a medical education by parents who wanted to secure their daughter’s future by marrying her off at a young age to a doctor; her father surviving torture in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp; and Rose herself adopting an abandoned baby girl from China. By drawing affinities between her family’s struggle for survival across generations and the wounds family members inflicted on each other, Rose reveals the nuanced and unsparing understanding that intimacy demands and affords. Rose goes on to give this filial perspective historical capital when, at the end of her final chapter, she discusses Magona’s 1998 novel Mother to Mother —a fictionalized personal account of Evelyn Manquina’s life, the mother of Mongezi Manquina, who was granted Amnesty by the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission for his 1993 murder of white American student Amy Biehl.  Like Rose’s own family history, this fictionalized mother’s story restores her own and her family’s historical dignity, by simultaneously “tracing the inhumanity of the apartheid regime,” while nonetheless insisting on the value and “complexity of her inner mind” (205-6).  Neither the mother nor her son are innocent—the passive victims of institutionalised racism—or guilty—the exemplary neoliberal subjects making free choices for which they need to be held accountable. Here, much like in her first chapter, Rose’s writing turns to mothers’ stories in order to restore a badly needed complexity and open-endedness to clear and conclusive public discourses about “us” and “them.”

The ethical complexity and weight of the first and last chapters is not as easily detectable in the ones in-between, which juxtapose specific authors and contexts in a manner that reduces their singularities to a common theme of suffering. Morrison’s Sethe (in Beloved ) is compared to Euripides’ Medea for committing infanticide (in the “Loving” segment of Part 2); post-natal depression in Plath is discussed in relation to its “pandemic” presence “among the poor blacks” of contemporary South Africa (186); De Beauvoir’s assertions of the alienation a mother experiences “in her body and her social dignity” (132), is conceived as a “path of a new ethics” that “puts us in touch with the stranger” in every form, inspiring protests against cruel immigration and deportation policies (140). It is this rhetorical “us” that troubled me as I read Rose’s book—an “us” that invites the reader to overlook the gnawing awareness of the stark material differences among the mothers referenced in the book, both real and fictional, and to ignore the radical disparity among mothering experiences historically and today. At the end of her book Rose invites mothers to conceive of themselves as a collective with the potential of “bring[ing] the world to an end as we know it” (208).  Rose goes on to assert “I suspect, certainly for mothers, this would be no bad thing” (208).  This concluding call to arms is a welcome corrective to the “neoliberal intensification of mothering” she names and critiques early in her book (17-8).  Nonetheless Rose here appears to overlook the fact that many mothers who have been conquered, displaced, and exiled in modern history, have already experienced their world end to no great advantage. If a collective ethic can emerge from the perspective of these mothers, it may not be one that embodies the radical freedom that Hannah Arendt attributes to the principle of natality, whereby, as Rose herself notes, “every new birth [becomes a] supreme anti-totalitarian moment” (79). Instead, these women, who have found ways to raise their children in the aftermath of systematic destructions of their societies, may show “us” a  way of moving past the facile melancholia we suffer over the crises we have brought onto ourselves—environmental, economic, sociocultural. To paraphrase Rose, these mothers may help us bring the fantasy of freedom as we know it to an end, and with it, the need to scapegoat the Other for exposing our inherent vulnerability and interdependence.

Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty  by Jacqueline Rose was published by Faber and Faber in 2018.

Yianna Liatsos is a Lecturer in English at the University of Limerick, Ireland.  She has published essays on critical theory and post-apartheid literature and her current research is in narrative medicine and identity.

Share this:

• Click to print (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)

You May Also Like

The rise of well-being in public health.

The Many Lives of Milk at the Wellcome Collection

Reload last saved game: mental health, video gaming and the fantastic in Netflix’s “Russian Doll” (2019)

Leave a reply cancel reply.

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Notify me of follow-up comments by email.

Notify me of new posts by email.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed .

Privacy Overview

Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.

To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to  upgrade your browser .

Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.

• We're Hiring!
• Help Center

Review of 'Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty'

2018, Arena Magazine

Related Papers

Institutionalized Children Exploration and Beyond (ICEB)

ICB: Institutionalised Children Explorations and Beyond

Martha Smithey

Death OfAll

Common Knowledge

Nadja Reissland

Philosophical Inquiries into Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Mothering : Maternal Subjects edited by Sheila Lintott and Maureen Sander-Staudt

Sheila Lintott

Short Fiction in Theory & Practice

Zsuzsanna Lénárt-Muszka

American author Willa C. Richards’s short story ‘Failure to Thrive’ (2019) thematizes physical, mental and emotional health by centring a young and presumably White American couple and their newborn. The couple have trouble communicating with each other, and crucial pieces of information are withheld from the reader as well. At the same time, numerous references to different types of violence emerge as markers of the maternal throughout the story to such an extent that the maternal body becomes the site not only of difference and unknowability but of violence as well. I anchor my analysis in motherhood studies and argue that motherhood is the discursive lens through which interlocking issues of embodiment, dehumanizing medical practices and diverse types of violence are exposed in ‘Failure to Thrive’. While attending to the narrative design of the story, I demonstrate how the ailing mother becomes a figure on whom the tropes of violence and incommunicability as well as the wide-reac...

Rachael Newberry

Shelley Park

Studies in the Maternal

Sara De Benedictis

RELATED PAPERS

The American Biology Teacher

Martin Nickels

Revista De Sociologia E Politica

Luis Antonio Francisco de Souza

Journal of Contaminant Hydrology

Noura Fajraoui

Widya Yuridika

Purnawan Negara

Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Engineering Systems

Luis Nataniel Ticona Flores

Revista Brasileira de Ciência Política

MARIO PABLO FUKS

Environmental Modeling & Assessment

Nicolas Clootens

Canadian oncology nursing journal = Revue canadienne de nursing oncologique

Assiut Scientific Nursing Journal

Mona Mohamed ElSayed Mayhob

Yasutaka Seki

Journal of Applied Physics

Naoki Fukata

Clinical science (London, England : 1979)

Jitka Žurmanová

The Showa University Journal of Medical Sciences

TERUMASA SAWADA

The Journal of Immunology

Don W Powell

Journal of Clinical Oncology

Carrie Rentschler

Journal of International Migration and Integration

Mathew J. Creighton

Research Square (Research Square)

Biswajit Baral

THIAGO CAMPOS ASSUNCAO

Educational and Psychological Measurement

Paul De Boeck

Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation

Rajashree Srinivasan

Therapeutic Advances in Psychopharmacology

Kay Wilhelm

Meir Benayahu ז״ל

Journal of the National Council of Less Commonly Taught Languages

Wafa Hassan

Climate Dynamics

Mariano Sastre

International Journal of Control

Daniel Cheng

RELATED TOPICS

•   We're Hiring!
•   Help Center
• Find new research papers in:
• Health Sciences
• Earth Sciences
• Cognitive Science
• Mathematics
• Computer Science
• Academia ©2024

Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty , by Jacqueline Rose, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2018, 237 pp.

• Book Review
• Published: 18 October 2019
• Volume 79 , pages 640–643, ( 2019 )

Cite this article

• Elaine P. Zickler PhD, LCSW 1  

407 Accesses

Explore all metrics

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price includes VAT (Russian Federation)

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Rent this article via DeepDyve

Institutional subscriptions

Ferrante, E. (2016). Frantumaglia: A writer’s journey , trans. Ann Goldstein. New York: Europa.

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

26 E. Oak Ave., Moorestown, NJ, 08057, USA

Elaine P. Zickler PhD, LCSW

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Elaine P. Zickler PhD, LCSW .

Additional information

Publisher's note.

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Zickler, E.P. Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty , by Jacqueline Rose, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2018, 237 pp.. Am J Psychoanal 79 , 640–643 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1057/s11231-019-09216-z

Download citation

Published : 18 October 2019

Issue Date : December 2019

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1057/s11231-019-09216-z

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Find a journal
• Publish with us
• Track your research

• Kindle Store
• Kindle eBooks
• Politics & Social Sciences

Promotions apply when you purchase

These promotions will be applied to this item:

Some promotions may be combined; others are not eligible to be combined with other offers. For details, please see the Terms & Conditions associated with these promotions.

Buy for others

Buying and sending ebooks to others.

• Select quantity
• Buy and send eBooks
• Recipients can read on any device

These ebooks can only be redeemed by recipients in the US. Redemption links and eBooks cannot be resold.

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required .

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

Follow the author

Image Unavailable

• To view this video download Flash Player

Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty Kindle Edition

A simple argument guides this book: motherhood is the place in our culture where we lodge, or rather bury, the reality of our own conflicts. By making mothers the objects of both licensed idealization and cruelty, we blind ourselves to the world’s iniquities and shut down the portals of the heart. Mothers are the ultimate scapegoat for our personal and political failings, for everything that is wrong with the world, which becomes their task (unrealizable, of course) to repair. Moving commandingly between pop cultural references such as Roald Dahl’s Matilda to insights on motherhood in the ancient world and the contemporary stigmatization of single mothers, Jacqueline Rose delivers a groundbreaking report into something so prevalent we hardly notice. Mothers is an incisive, rousing call to action from one of our most important contemporary thinkers.

• Print length 256 pages
• Language English
• Sticky notes On Kindle Scribe
• Publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date May 1, 2018
• File size 5431 KB
• Page Flip Enabled
• Word Wise Enabled
• Enhanced typesetting Enabled
• See all details

Customers who bought this item also bought

Editorial Reviews

"Jacqueline Rose’s Mothers has already joined the canon of nonfiction books I hold most dear. This is in part because of the importance and luminous clarity of Rose’s argument, and in part because of the supremely intelligent and graceful prose in which she delivers it. Her writing here feels somehow both laser-focused in its analyses, and loose, roving, free. Her book distills a lifetime of psychoanalytic, literary, and political engagement into a fierce, generous study of human complexity―one which pushes us to reckon with the urgent question of how we might stop 'tearing mothers and the world to pieces.'" ―Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts "A sort of Rosetta Stone for the moment that examines the particular mix of fascination and dread that mothers engender . . . Rose is a calm and stylish writer whose rangy essays . . . have become indispensable reading during the current reckoning around power and sexuality." ―Parul Sehgal, The New York Times "Rose is, as ever, devastating in her elegance and striking in her ingenuity . . . Running throughout the book is the conviction that, in matters of both self and state, the boundaries between inside and outside are violent and blurred―a riddle for which mothers are the impossible key.” ―Tobi Haslett, Bookforum " Mothers is a passionate polemic . . . Rose's intellectual range is dazzling." ― The Economist "Dismantling the ideal is Jacqueline Rose’s purpose in Mothers . . . Searching always calmly and intelligently for reasons behind extreme feelings, Rose draws on a wide range of literary and philosophical sources." ―Ruth Scurr, The Times Literary Supplement (London) "As a literary scholar and psychoanalytic thinker, Rose has long insisted that we pay close attention to the subterranean fears, fantasies, and narratives that structure our most pressing sociopolitical problems . . . I was grateful to Rose for giving voice to [the] conflicted realities [of motherhood], for inviting her reader to acknowledge them without fear or shame . . . She had positioned herself as a mother to mothers, ready to soothe all of us who felt like we were constantly failing." ―Merve Emre, The Nation "Compelling . . . [Rose] has a dazzling imaginative range and is fluent in many disciplines . . . Rose is one of our most passionate and intuitive delvers, and she has brought back from the molten core of the deep dark places a fine book, another urgent feminist appeal for cultural change, before it is too late." ―Susan McKay, The Irish Times "Wide-ranging and incisive." ―Hannah Beckerman, The Guardian "Nuanced . . . Mothers is giving me another lens through which to think about individual and collective responsibility." Kika Sroka-Miller, The Bookseller "Rose is a fearless and erudite thinker . . . Thoroughly literary and bracing in its intensity, Rose's Mothers cannot be ignored." ― Booklist "[Rose] seeks to understand exactly what is being asked of mothers on a daily basis and to distill those demands into succinct causalities . . . For those readers interested not just in feminist theory, but also gender theory as it relates to parenting, this will be a rewarding reading experience. Clever, insightful essays on motherhood as 'the ultimate scapegoat for our personal and political failings.'" ― Kirkus "Intellectually rigorous . . . Readers of Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts will be drawn to Rose’s rumination." ― Publishers Weekly "Jacqueline Rose’s book tore me apart, reminding me of things I would rather forget . . . Rose [is] one of our very best cultural critics . . . The book excels in brilliant psychoanalytical readings on the ways that the interiority of motherhood is silenced . . . This is a book of pain, joy and brutality, a howl of anger." ―Suzanne Moore, The New Statesman (UK)

About the Author

Product details.

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0769WHMBN
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Farrar, Straus and Giroux (May 1, 2018)
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ May 1, 2018
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 5431 KB
• Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
• Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 256 pages
• #31 in Counselling & Psychology Essays
• #233 in Sociology of Marriage & Family (Kindle Store)
• #638 in Feminist Theory (Kindle Store)

About the author

Jacqueline rose.

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

Customer reviews

Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.

• Sort reviews by Top reviews Most recent Top reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. please try again later..

Top reviews from other countries

Report an issue

• Amazon Newsletter
• About Amazon
• Accessibility
• Sustainability
• Press Center
• Investor Relations
• Amazon Devices
• Amazon Science
• Sell on Amazon
• Sell apps on Amazon
• Supply to Amazon
• Protect & Build Your Brand
• Become an Affiliate
• Become a Delivery Driver
• Start a Package Delivery Business
• Advertise Your Products
• Self-Publish with Us
• Become an Amazon Hub Partner
• › See More Ways to Make Money
• Amazon Visa
• Amazon Store Card
• Amazon Secured Card
• Amazon Business Card
• Shop with Points
• Credit Card Marketplace
• Reload Your Balance
• Amazon Currency Converter
• Your Account
• Your Orders
• Shipping Rates & Policies
• Amazon Prime
• Returns & Replacements
• Manage Your Content and Devices
• Recalls and Product Safety Alerts
• Conditions of Use
• Privacy Notice
• Consumer Health Data Privacy Disclosure
• Your Ads Privacy Choices

• International edition
• Australia edition
• Europe edition

In brief: Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty; The Colour of Bee Larkham’s Murder; The Sparsholt Affair

Mothers: an essay on love and cruelty.

Jacqueline Rose Faber & Faber, £12.99, pp256

In her introduction to this wide-ranging and incisive book, Jacqueline Rose writes that motherhood is the scapegoat “for our personal and political failings, for everything that is wrong with the world”. Incorporating psychoanalytic theory, feminist theory, literature and sociology, she traces the roles of women through history. “There will always be a limit to what mothers can do for their child,” she writes, “and therefore… to what we can ask of a mother.”

The Colour of Bee Larkham’s Murder

Sarah J Harris HarperCollins, £12.99, pp448

Jasper is 13 years old and lives with his father following his mother’s death from cancer. He has synaesthesia – he interprets sounds as colours – and face-blindness, able to recognise people only by their voices. When his neighbour, Bee, goes missing, Jasper is convinced he has murdered her and that his father has helped conceal the crime. Harris produces a rich tapestry of secondary characters and engaging plot lines involving predatory sexual behaviour, social ostracism and bullying. But it is in her meticulously researched and visceral portrayal of Jasper’s synaesthetic world that the novel is at its most distinctive and compelling.

The Sparsholt Affair

Alan Hollinghurst Picador, £8.99, pp464 (paperback)

From wartime Oxford to London in the 2010s, Hollinghurst’s sixth novel is a dazzling and deftly constructed story about art, identity and relationships. David Sparsholt is the elusive protagonist, but it is those around him – the friends who try to seduce him, and his son, Johnny, coming to terms with his own homosexuality – who drive the narrative. British gay history is familiar territory for Booker prize-winning Hollinghurst, but there is an elliptical quality here that contributes to the novel’s intrigue: key pieces of information are only loosely alluded to, and some plot lines remain unsolved. That these only add to the pleasure of reading the novel is testament to Hollinghurst’s structural dexterity and narrative confidence.

• The Observer
• Alan Hollinghurst

Comments (…)

Most viewed.