A startlingly new vision of motherhood from the author of A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings 

When Helen Jukes falls pregnant, she does what anyone else would do. She searches for information to help make sense of the changes underway inside her. But as the months pass and her body becomes increasingly strange, the pregnancy guides seem insufficient; even the advice of her friends feels oppressive.

So she widens her frame of reference, looking beyond humans to ask what motherhood looks like in other species. Here she begins a process of wilder enquiry, in which stories of spiders, polar bears, bonobos and

burying beetles (among others) begin to unsettle and expand her notion of what mothering is; what it could be.

As she enters the sleeplessness, chaos and intimate discoveries of life with a newborn, these animal stories become Helen’s companions and guides. They allow her to explore where her own animality begins and ends and how the polluted stuff of human industry has come to influence life, even from its very beginnings.

A passionate, visceral and intimate account of a body changed, Mother Animal combines personal memoir with fresh insights from evolutionary biology, zoology and toxicology to ask the big questions that lie at the heart of what it means to be alive – and a mother – today.

‘Magnificent. I was electrified by Jukes’ gimlet-eyed telling of stories of parenting and nesting and birthing from our natural world.’ – Lucy Jones, author of Matrescence

‘A deeply thoughtful interrogation of motherhood and the way it ties us to our natural (and not-so-natural) environment.’ – Leah Hazard, author of Womb 

‘Unlike anything I’ve ever read. A tender and bewildered account of motherhood, and a powerful reflection on what it means to be alive in the Anthropocene. There is so much beauty here – and so much uncertainty – as well as an extraordinary capacity to inhabit both conditions at once. Jukes’ voice is cracked open to the world, but to be cracked open is also to be joined to others, not only in exposure and risk, but through care and solidarity. The achievement of this book is to widen those circles of care – and to situate human experiences of mothering within the vast unfolding story of our animal neighbours and kin.’ – Michael Malay, author of Late Light