The Mothers

"Alternately hysterically funny and heartbreaking...down to the bone stripped-bare honest."

-A.M. Homes, author of May We Be Forgiven and The Mistress's Daughter

"The Mothers is a searing examination of the very human desire to be that seemingly simple thing: a mother. Jennifer Gilmore explores the emotional depth and breadth of mothering with raw honesty and her signature grace."

-Ann Hood, author of The Red Thread and The Knitting Circle

"With a deft touch, lacerating humor, and a gaze at once steely and tenderhearted, Jennifer Gilmore takes us deep into the experience of maternal desire. This is a thoughtful, emotionally resonant and intimate novel."

-Dani Shapiro, author of Devotion and Slow Motion

"Motherhood, like all great topics for a novel, can overwhelm. It's a massive subject with many aspects; how to even approach it? Jennifer Gilmore jumps in, beautifully, in The Mothers, which explores the deep and plangent desire for a child, but also takes on the epic state of contemporary motherhood itself: its status, its limitations, its pleasures and sorrows, and the fantasies that inevitably surround it. This well-observed exploration of maternity both day-to-day and existential has the ache of longing at its heart, and the result is both broad and personal, and always engaging."

-Meg Wolitzer, author of The Uncoupling and The Ten-Year Nap