Partum

From the Stella Prize–shortlisted author of The Shut-ins and Body Friend comes a daring new work of auto-fiction that challenges the very language of transformation. Partum tracks two years in a woman’s life as she negotiates a new and demanding reality. As she struggles to produce an artwork that can represent the inexpressible, she finds herself caught between a fading past self and an unrecognisable present. Drawing on the philosophies of language and the mind-body connection, the narrator explores the visceral states of a body uprooted—all while observing a self-imposed silence around the source of her change.Divergent, honest, and intellectually soaring, Partum is not a memoir of motherhood, but a philosophy of the maternal state. It is a book for anyone who has ever found themselves at the limits of language, seeking a way to render the world anew.