Book Recommendations: Motherhood
On 9 book recommendations which allow the mothers voice to be heard...
Mothers in novels are a relatively recent phenomenon. Perhaps they were always present, but rarely as the protagonist. More often, they hovered at the edges of the narrative, depicted as weak, submissive, or a source of frustration for their daughters. In most cases, they were condemned or quietly silenced.
The rise of mother-focused fiction began around 2018 and still dominates the tables in bookshops today, which I, of course, love. This shift was mapped out in Elkin’s much-cited essay, Why All the Books About Motherhood? I leaned heavily on this piece during my thesis to argue that Atwood’s 1993 novel The Robber Bride remains deeply relevant. That said, I won’t be touching on The Robber Bride here, as its focus leans more toward daughters, and the mothers in that story have already passed away. It fits more comfortably into a future recommendation I have planned on mother-daughter relationships, which often hold a different kind of complexity.
For now, I want to focus on books that centre the mother herself. Stories that attempt to capture the experience of motherhood from within, where the mother speaks not just as a figure in relation to the child, but as someone with her own interiority. Of course, the mother and daughter are always bound in some way, but at least here the mother is no longer silent.
You might notice that most of the books I include were published after 2018. While there are earlier texts that explore motherhood with nuance, I don’t think they quite belong in this specific category.
Motherhood, Sheila Heti
This is the one. The mother of all motherhood books. A book about not becoming a mother as well as becoming a mother. Heti circles the question of whether to have children with the urgency of someone pacing a late-night kitchen, heart pounding. It’s autofiction, yes, but it’s also philosophy, diary, prayer. She writes motherhood as a kind of metaphysical battleground between freedom and fate. Each line is cut glass. It’s the closest thing I’ve read to thinking in real time, as if someone handed you their actual brain to borrow for a weekend.
You Be Mother, Meg Mason
Meg Mason always writes with this soft, sly clarity — funny, devastating, never trying too hard. You Be Mother looks at what happens when someone becomes your mother, even if she isn’t technically supposed to. It’s about chosen family, the roles we slip into, the ways we mother and are mothered outside of biology. You come away realising how much of mothering happens in small gestures, in glances across the kitchen table, in who remembers how you like your toast.
A Life’s Work, Rachel Cusk
Cusk’s writing is always a kind of scalpel. Sharp, clinical, precise. And A Life’s Work is her turning that tool on early motherhood. It’s raw and unsentimental, often to the point of discomfort. But that’s what makes it necessary. She writes about exhaustion, identity loss, the alien nature of infancy — not to scandalise, but to testify. There’s a certain grace in her refusal to polish the experience into something digestible.
The School for Good Mothers, Jessamine Chan
This one takes the pressures of modern parenting and gives them the Black Mirror treatment. What if being a “bad” mother could land you in a re-education centre? Chan’s dystopia doesn’t feel far off. It’s a portrait of surveillance parenting and impossible standards. While not the most revolutionary of novels or dystopias, it nails the unease: how mothers are so often watched, judged, and expected to perform a kind of flawless sacrifice.
Breast and Eggs, Mieko Kawakami
Set in Tokyo but emotionally borderless, Kawakami's novel splits its gaze between a woman considering breast enhancement and her sister contemplating single motherhood via sperm donation. It’s about what it means to control your body, your future, your fertility. And what happens when the world thinks it knows better. It’s psychological, political, deeply interior. A quiet storm of a book.
Nightbitch, Rachel Yoder
A mother turns into a dog. Metaphorically but also kind of really. Nightbitch is surreal and feral and brutal and true. It captures the feeling of being consumed by motherhood. The sensory overload, the shapeshifting identity, the rage that simmers just beneath the surface. It’s messy and visceral and full of fur and blood and love.
Dept. of Speculation, Jenny Offill
A novel made of fragments, like a mind trying to keep itself together. Offill captures the slow crumble of a marriage under the weight of parenthood, ambition, and everyday life. It’s about how a mother remains an artist, how a wife remains a self. I didn’t love this book but I know others rate it highly if you enjoy a more fragmented narrative style.
Pachinko, Min Jin Lee
At first glance, Pachinko is a sweeping historical novel: generations of a Korean family navigating exile, poverty, and discrimination in Japan. But zoom in, and it’s also a story of maternal resilience. Sunja, the matriarch, is luminous in her strength — making impossible choices for her children’s futures. It’s a study in sacrifice and dignity, the quiet heroism of everyday mothering. And the generational growth from mother to mother. This is one of my favourite novels and one that struck me the most.
Room, Emma Donoghue
Told from the perspective of a five-year-old who’s never seen the outside world (and who I find a little annoying), Room is at once a harrowing story of captivity and a profound testament to maternal love. The mother, not named and known only as “Ma,” creates an entire universe within four walls to protect her son. It’s a reminder that motherhood, even in its darkest moments, can be an act of profound imaginative resilience.