The Birth of Love: A Novel
Joanna Kavenna
Language: English
Pages: 304
ISBN: 0805091548
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
From the winner of the Orange Award for New Writers, an epic novel of childbirth―past, present, and future
The year is 1865. In Vienna, Dr. Ignasz Semmelweiss has been hounded into an asylum by his medical peers, ridiculed for his claim that doctors' unwashed hands are the root cause of childbed fever. In present-day London, Bridget Hughes juggles her young son, husband, and mother as she plans her home birth, unprepared for the trial she is about to endure. Somewhere in 2135, in a world where humans are birthed and raised in breeding farms, Prisoner 730004 is on trial for concealing a pregnancy.
Through three stories spanning centuries, acclaimed novelist Joanna Kavenna explores the most basic plight of women, from the slaughterhouse of primitive medicine to a futurisic vision of technological oppression. Poised at the midpoint is Bridget, whose fervent belief in the wisdom of nature is tested in one of the most gripping accounts of labor to appear in fiction.
Original, powerful, and played out against a vast canvas, The Birth of Love is at once a novel about the creation of human life, science and faith, madness and compromise, and the epic journey of motherhood.
A Day in the Life: One Family, the Beautiful People, and the End of the Sixties
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We’ve a long day ahead.’ And she clinked her glass on his. * Briefly he panicked, felt his heart fluttering in his breast, thought how difficult it was even to breathe, to lift the chest, fill the lungs and empty them again – he sat there, looking at his hands, paying careful attention to the rising and falling of his chest, and after a few minutes he was able to lift his head. Someone was speaking, but not to him. ‘I liked your programme about George Lamott,’ a woman was saying. Alice.
With the second child, she would be more realistic. She was taking three months off. She would try not to work at all during this time. She would simply enjoy her children. Patrick would go back to work after two weeks, and she would get to know her new baby, and help Calumn to adjust. * That was if the baby came, she thought, gripped by superstition and not wanting to plan. She heard Calumn crying again and assumed Patrick was trying to leave the room. He wanted reassurance. Naturally he.
This is our life this is meant to be a life. Who are they? On behalf of the Protectors, we assure you that such questions are not appropriate and will not be answered. Cannot be answered. You do not know. I begin to think you do not know who these Protectors are you work for. You have never seen them? I think – yes, I think it must be true that even you have never seen them. Have they seen each other? Are they bodies and humans or something else? My head, I think you must have killed me. Am.
Water and thinks of his heart beating. Below he traces ribbons of light and motion spanning from one stone building to the next. He hears the sirens and the hum of the night. He breathes deeply and thinks of the planet turning in space and time creeping onwards. * Time will creep, and then it will spring the dawn upon him. * Robert von Lucius wakes with a start, and finds he is thinking, ‘But what if it is really true?’ This theory of Semmelweis, he realises he means. He has considered it.
It is a surprise to her when they stop. They come to a sudden halt outside a door. High and broad, and barred against her. * ‘Wait here,’ say the guards. * In Lazarettgasse, Robert von Lucius hammers on the door of the asylum, and for a long time no one comes to meet him. He hears bells tolling in the distance. He hammers again, more loudly. There is another lengthy pause, and then, finally, the face of Herr Meyer appears, but he will only open the door a crack. He seems different today,.