Is motherhood supposed to feel like this? 

Somewhere in New York, in a cramped two-bed apartment that wilts beneath the intense August heat, a young woman has just returned home after giving birth to her first child. The baby entered the world violently and directly. Let's call her Button.

Our narrator knows she is not the first woman to give birth, to nurse a child, to hold and carry and soothe and cradle. She is a competent person, a respected literary translator in another life. And yet she finds that the language of motherhood is one she doesn't understand. 

Isolated and alone, struggling to reclaim her identity as it appears to dissolve around her, a lifeline emerges in the form of her ailing upstairs neighbour, Peter. Like her, he is confined to the walls of this apartment building. But they are both running out of time. Something is soon to crack. 

The Nursery is a searing, empathetic account of those first heady postpartum days, the slow process of staggering back towards the simple pleasure of life, and how vital love is to pull anyone out from the dark.