Anna Solomon

"A novel about the entangled lives of two women in 1920s New England, both mothers to the same unforgettable girl"-- 1917. Beatrice Haven-- Jewish, unwed-- sneaks out of her uncle's house on Cape Ann, Massachusetts, leaves her newborn baby at the foot of a pear tree, and watches as another woman claims the infant as her own. Ten years later Prohibition is in full swing, post-WWI America is in the grips of rampant xenophobia, and Bea's hopes for her...

"Thirty acclaimed writers share their personal birth stories--the extraordinary, the ordinary, the terrifying, the sublime, the profane It's an elemental, almost animalistic urge--the expectant mother's hunger for birth narratives. Bookstores are filled with month-by-month pregnancy manuals, but the shelves are virtually empty of artful, entertaining, unvarnished accounts of labor and delivery--the stories that new mothers need most. Here is a book...