Francesca Segal’s identical twin girls were delivered by emergency Caesarean at 30 weeks, after which they were immediately handed over to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). It felt, she writes in Mother Ship, her tender but mighty memoir of the two months that followed, “not like a birth but an evisceration”.

This book reads more like a thriller than a memoir on motherhood at times. There's peril and heart-stopping drama in the beautiful prose which often reads like a love letter to the NHS and all its wonder. It's a story of human triumph and fortitude and has stayed with me long after I finished reading.

A very moving and honest account of parents' time spent in NICU with premature twins. Very informative, with medical terminology explained well.

Mother Ship follows Francesca in the form of diary entries as her identical twin daughters are born ten weeks prematurely and whisked straight to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. The memoir is essentially a love letter to her daughters as she describes the next fifty-plus days of becoming a mother to babies who are critically ill and dependent on the doctors and nurses of the NHS to survive.

As much as this memoir is a love letter from Francesca to her daughters, it is also an ode to the other mothers who are holding it together alongside her in the Milking Shed, as she refers to the room in which they all pump the required amount per day together. They hold each other up and joke together and commiserate together and I loved the frankness in which Francesca portrayed her relationship in particular with Sophie and with Kemisha. I don’t know these women, but I love them.

I find all medical non-fiction fascinating, but this book is spectacular in another sense and that is down to Francesca’s prose. Her writing is lyrical and emotional and haunting: telling of having to watch your child in pain and not even be able to comfort them. Becoming a mother and not being able to hold your daughters. Adam Kay calls this novel a “warts-and-all” love letter to the NHS, and it is a reminder of the wonderful care that in the UK we get for free, amongst all of the other things that it is.

A wonderful, wonderful book.

Such a perfect description of the emotional journey of life on the neonatal unit. Reading this made me teary on multiple occasions as it seemed to be describing exactly how I felt when my little boy was in the unit. I think anyone who has had a child in the neonatal unit will relate to this book and it will help others understand just what life if like when your baby's arrival doesn't go to plan.

Mother Ship - Francesca Segal. This is an interesting and absorbing account of the period immediately after the author's twin daughters are born at 30 weeks, that conveys the simmering tensions, highs and lows of being thrust into the nailbiting environment of the neonatal intensive care unit. I liked the way the author brought the staff, especially the doctors and nurses to life, her descriptions makes these people leap off the page. I understood why she felt love for the gentle consultant who quite literally talked her twin daughters into getting ever stronger.

Her sisters in the "mother ship" - the mothers of other children in the Unit are the friends that every woman needs. A contemporary touch is the way in which these women buoy each other up via a WhatsApp group.

I really enjoyed reading this book and was fascinated to discover after reading more about the author, that she is the daughter of *the* Erich Segal of Love Story fame. No wonder she writes so well. Highly recommended.

Mother Ship is by far one of the best books I have read this year. Francesca Segal seares the pages with her prose, the words honest, both joyful and painful. Mother Ship is written so well it could be a novel; unlike other medical memoirs it doesn’t rely on medical shocks or crude language to fascinate, instead weaving a perfectly shaped story. At the part where she first breast feeds unexpectedly, I wept openly on the tube. A book I’ll be recommending to everyone I know.

Once I knew that I was pregnant I was overwhelmed with thoughts of those early days with my baby, only briefly letting dark thoughts of ‘what ifs’ into my mind before dismissing them because those things only happen to other people. For some mothers, those dark thoughts become a reality when things go terribly wrong. This is the author’s personal journey when that happens to her, her husband and their newly born premature twin girls.
Written from the heart, this is a truly intimate daily journey from the moment the tiny babies are born, with skin so delicate that they can’t have clothes on or be held by their mummy and daddy. The girls, without names yet are transported to the neo-natal unit for intensive care, The Mothership, where a small community of likewise parents find comfort and hope in each other.
Every new day and night brings new challenges, heartache and celebrations as I felt privileged to get to know the other mums that kept vigil by their babies sides, they were closer than family because you had to experience this to really understand. I felt anxious and fearful for these tiny babies with an incredible will to survive the odds.
The writing feels raw with emotion, nothing held back, so many times I prayed for all these children although I knew that the time had gone already, their fate had already happened. The author praises the wonderful dedicated teams of doctors and nurses that care for the babies and rightly so. There is a very brief part of the book where the author mentions the cost of such care and just how lucky we are and I totally agree.
I felt really privileged to share the author and others journey at what must have been a terrifying time. I wish to thank NetGalley for an e-copy of this book which I have reviewed honestly.

I’m a big fan of Segal’s novels, especially The Innocents, one of the loveliest debut novels of the last decade, so I was delighted to hear she was coming out with a health-themed memoir about giving birth to premature twins. Mother Ship is a visceral diary of the first eight weeks in the lives of her daughters, who were born by Caesarean section at 29 weeks in October 2015 and spent the next two months in the NICU, “an extremely well-funded prison or perhaps more accurately a high-tech zoo.”

Segal strives to come to terms with this unnatural start to motherhood. “Taking my unready daughters from within me felt not like a birth but an evisceration,” she writes; “my children do not appear to require mothering. Instead they need sophisticated medical intervention.” She describes with tender precision the feeling of being torn: between the second novel she’d been in the middle of writing and the all-consuming nature of early parenthood; and between her two girls (known for much of the book as “A-lette” and “B-lette”), who are at one point separated in different hospitals.

As well as portraying her own state of mind, Segal crafts twinkly pen portraits of the others she encountered in the NICU, including the staff but especially her fellow preemie mums, who met in a “milking shed” where they pumped breast milk for the babies they were so afraid of losing that they resisted naming. (Though it was touch and go for a while, A-lette and B-lette finally earned the names Raffaella and Celeste and came home safely.) Female friendship is a subsidiary theme in this exploration of desperate love and helplessness. The layman’s look at the inside workings of medicine would have made this one of my current few favorites for next year’s Wellcome Book Prize (which, alas, is on hiatus). After encountering some unpleasant negativity about the NHS in a recent read, I was relieved to find that Segal’s outlook is pure gratitude.

I saw Francesca Segal in conversation with Amanda Craig at the Jewish Book Festival in March 2018 and was immediately intrigued when she said she was writing a non-fiction book about the premature birth of her identical twin daughters ten weeks before their due date. Published in the UK this week, ‘Mother Ship’ is presented as a diary of the 56 fraught days the babies (initially known as A-lette and B-lette) spent in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) in the weeks leading up to Christmas 2015.

Even though it is known from the outset that the eventual outcome is thankfully a happy one, there is no shortage of dramatic tension in Segal’s account of the emotional rollercoaster which followed a traumatic birth and the period of limbo where she is a mother but cannot fully begin “motherhood” in the way she expected. The sense of fragility is brilliantly conveyed in different ways, from the delicacy of the babies’ skin which means they are unable to wear clothes in their incubators, to the terrifying precariousness of their lives when one of the twins is diagnosed with necrotising enterocolitis (NEC), a dangerous infection with a survival rate below 50% for pre-term babies.

Having twins in this situation presents further logistical difficulties for Segal and her husband, Gabe. Within days, one of their daughters is transferred to a different hospital, leaving Segal to shuttle between the two across London, all while she is expressing milk up to ten times a day and recovering from major surgery herself. And there are other parents from all walks of life in similar circumstances - Segal refers to the place where the new mothers of premature babies bond over their shared experience as the “milking shed”. The NHS as an institution and the kindness of the individuals within it are celebrated as a central part of the experience.

The Wellcome Book Prize awarded to fiction and non-fiction books on the theme of healthcare and medicine has been “paused” and won’t be taking place in 2020, which is a shame as I am sure this insightful and beautifully written account would have been a very strong contender. Many thanks to Random House UK Chatto & Windus for sending me a review copy of ‘Mother Ship’ via NetGalley.

This book follows Francesca, her husband and her new born baby twins journey. From their delivery until they are eventually allowed to go home. The twins were born ten weeks premature and had to fight for survival. She tells us about the relationships she forms within the special baby care unit. I have never had twins but I have had two of my babies in the neonatal ward. Mines were full term and that was worry enough. I can't imagine the worry and stress it must have took, hoping and praying that your twin baby daughters survive. This is a beautifully written book.

I would like to thank NetGalley, Random House UK, Vintage Publishing and the author Francesca Segal for my ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I have not had one baby never mind twins, like this author, and then add in that both are very premature and you have the premise of this amazing book. How Ms Segal found the strength - or the time - to document the journey she takes with her husband and her premature daughters astonishes me. But she doesn't just document the journey, she takes you along with her. It is beautifully written.

The author is unselfish in her descriptions of the care she and her daughters receive from NHS staff and in her support and caring with and for other mothers who bond in the NICU. The descriptions are heart breaking at times and at other times quite wonderful. She certainly had a roller-coaster ride lasting months. Her husband has to put his "normal" life on hold and he, too, is part of the emotional highs and lows as the new little family come to terms with not actually being a family yet and not being able to share their babies with relatives.

"The exhausting ride of NICU is precisely this - peril and reprieve within hours of one another. I don't know how the staff aren't all stark raving mad with it. Who takes care of these caregivers? What support is there for them, in their indefatigable support of us?"

An excellent, honest book and I am very glad Ms Segal wrote it. It gives an insight into a world I will never experience and makes me even more grateful for our NHS.

I was given a copy of this book by Netgalley in return for an honest review.

This book is full of raw emotion. Francesca Segal has been so brave telling her story. There is so much raw emotion and love on every page. It brought back so many memories. My daughter spent the first 9 days of her life in special care and I can relate to so much of what was written. Experiences of my own and of the mothers I met.

Thank you to Netgalley for my copy.

This book must have been so difficult to write. It is such a beautiful piece of writing yet it’s so raw- I found myself emotionally attached to the twins willing them to get well.
It is truly a special book as Francesca and her family are inviting us into this heartfelt journey.
Highly recommended
Thank you to both NetGalley and Random House Uk for my eARC in exchange for my honest unbiased review

Actual rating 4.5

I feel truly honoured to have been able to read this account of the author and her amazing twins as they all fought for survival. I may not have children myself, but this story spoke to me on so many levels I felt as if I were right there with Francesca and all the other mums featured.

I cannot praise the author enough for putting her story out there and I sincerely hope it helps other, in some small way, to cope should the same thing ever happen to them.

Huge thanks to the author, the publisher and Netgalley for providing a copy.

When novelist Francesca segal’s twins are born very premature, she enters a hitherto unknown world of critical care.
This novel is the story of her babies’ fight for survival and of the relationships she forms in the special care baby unit over the following months.
But this is not just a tale of motherhood - I don’t have children yet found myself totally absorbed by a story of friendship, endurance and how you balance being a nice person as well as a stroppy NHS advocate for two tiny people!
It’s really quite a slight book but it’s a beautifully written love story - how Segal becomes the mother of children born out of time and expectation.
Recommended.

For some reason I never quite connected with this title, it never seemed to either the tension/seriousness of many medical narrative tales nor the outright humour of the ‘mummy blogger’ genre. It was still interesting but didn’t spark me.

What a stunning read. Full of ups and downs and beautifully written. Part of a lovely family tale which luckily ends well. You can feel the love in this book.

What a privilege to follow Francesca, her husband and her twins journey from delivery to going home. Truly special, full of hope and heart stopping moments as her premature twins fought to survive. Beautifully written.

Wow, this book has blown me away!!! Francesca Segal is one tough Mumma and I love the honesty she shows about her own feelings along her journey of motherhood. What an amazing book, mother, family and twin girls xxx

A wonderful heart warming book about a couple and their premature twins and how they are looked after and cared for by the wonderful NHS.
Well written. Emotional I was in tears then laughing out load.
Beautiful