Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty

A daring and provocative book-length essay on the role of mothers in culture, history and the human heart. Winner of the PEN Pinter Prize 2026'The brilliance of her literary insight, the lucidity of her prose, and the subtlety of her analyses are simply breathtaking' Edward Said'A model of what a public intellectual should be' Slavoj ZizekFrom one of the most important contemporary thinkers, a compelling, forceful tract about women and motherhood that demands immediate attention. Moving commandingly between pop cultural references such as Roald Dahl's 'Matilda' to observations about motherhood in the ancient world and thoughts about the stigmatization of single mothers in the UK, Mothers delivers a groundbreaking report into this often flattened and overlooked figure.