These remarkable stories are sustained by the experience of motherhood. They bring the psychological and physical reality of pregnancy, childbirth, mothering, and nurture alive in ways that few writers have ever attempted. Here is a bleak realism about relations between men and women, the expectation and the failure, the deeper currents of misogyny and sexism, and the violence of inequality and poverty: harsh and necessary snapshots of our condition. Elske Rahill's ruthless clarity is balanced by a compassionate identification with the humanity of the victims.