Night Waking

Author: Sarah Moss

Stock information

General Fields

  • : $37.00 NZD
  • : 9781847082152
  • : Granta Books
  • : Granta Books
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  • : February 2011
  • : United Kingdom
  • : 36.99
  • : March 2011
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  • : books

Special Fields

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  • : Sarah Moss
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  • : Paperback
  • : 311
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  • : 823.92
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  • : 416
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Barcode 9781847082152
9781847082152

Description

Historian Anna Bennett has a book to write. She also has an insomniac toddler, a precocious, death-obsessed seven-year-old, and a frequently-absent ecologist husband who has brought them all to Colsay, a desolate island in the Hebrides, so he can count the puffins. Ferociously sleep-deprived, torn between mothering and her desire for the pleasures of work and solitude, Anna becomes haunted by the discovery of a baby's skeleton in the garden of their house. Her narrative is punctuated by letters home, written 200 years before, by May, a young, middle-class midwife desperately trying to introduce modern medicine to the suspicious, insular islanders. The lives of these two characters intersect unexpectedly in this deeply moving but also at times blackly funny story about maternal ambivalence, the way we try to control children, and about women's vexed and passionate relationship with work.Moss's second novel displays an exciting expansion of her range - showing her to be both an excellent comic writer, and a novelist of great emotional depth.

Author description

Sarah Moss is a lecturer of English and American Literature at the University of Kent. She spent 2009-10 as a visiting lecturer at the University of Reykavik. She co-edits, with Nicola Humble, the Food series at Manchester University Press, and has a BA, MSc. and DPhil from Oxford University. Night Waking is her second novel.