“Taut . . . The prose, which appears in an elegant translation by Rosalind Harvey, retains a matter-of-factness, and in some places a synoptic quality that is rarely freighted with sadness or despair . . . It’s friendship, not crisis, that emerges as the novel’s focal point . . . Nettel . . . seems to be saying that ‘normal mothers’ do think ugly thoughts—or rather, that there is no such thing as a ‘normal mother.’ There is a strong tradition of works that connect maternal ambivalence to horror tropes—Rosemary’s Baby, The Fifth Child, We Need to Talk about Kevin—but Still Born is different . . . Nettel is making a case for chosen kinship.” —Sarah Resnick, London Review of Books

“Nettel is one of the leading lights in contemporary Latin American literature . . . I envy how naturally she makes use of language; her resistance to ornamentation and artifice; and the almost stoic fortitude with which she dispenses her profound and penetrating knowledge of human nature.” —Valeria Luiselli, author of Lost Children Archive

“Guadalupe Nettel is a brilliant anatomist of love and perversity, and each new book is a revelation.” —Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies

"Guadalupe Nettel reminds us that there is nothing stranger than our existence lived in containers of meat, blood and madness." —Mariana Enríquez, author of The Dangers of Smoking in Bed

"I love the work of Guadalupe Nettel, one of Mexico’s greatest living writers. Her fiction is brilliant and original, always suffused with sensuality and strange science." —Paul Theroux, author of The Mosquito Coast

"Nettel is free. She has succeeded in creating an audacious narrative style all her own, a singular and fearless way of being in the world. An essential voice of the new Latin American literature." —Enrique Vila-Matas, author of Mac’s Problem

"Still Born is an astonishingly elegant, intelligent, affecting novel, which has stayed in my mind from the moment I began it to long after I finished. I felt a huge sense of relief that I had encountered a work of art about ambivalence in mothering which encompassed a true authentic range of emotions and curiosities – vanity, aggression, jealousy and selfishness – with sanguine acceptance, as well as the beautiful and difficult project of giving and sustaining love which marks all our lives, mothers or otherwise." —Megan Nolan, author of Acts of Desperation

"In Still Born, Guadalupe Nettel renders with great veracity life as it is encountered in the everyday, taking us to the heart of the only things that really matter: life, death and our relationships with others. All of these are contained in the experience of motherhood, which this novel explores and deepens." —Annie Ernaux, author of The Years

"Still Born is a rare thing: an unsentimental analysis of the ambivalences and moral complexity of motherhood. It is a book which demands to be discussed, at length, with friends, and I longed to do so." —Jessie Greengrass, author of The High House

"I read Still Born in less than a day. It is perfect: deeply feminist, wise, funny and alive. Nettel is generous to each of her characters, and in prose that is crisp and light. I love this book." —Yara Rodrigues Fowler, author of there are more things

"Deeply intelligent, Still Born is a propulsive novel with a depth of feeling so woven into the language that it never feels worn or applied. The denatured quality of the tone means the ideas of the book – the suspicion of the body as having incompatible desires from the mind; the impulses versus the aversions to child-having; the complexities of the mother-child dynamic – all just absolutely sing. I loved it." —Susannah Dickey, author of Common Decency