The Birth Of Love Joanna Kavenna by Joanna Kavenna 9780805091540, 0805091548, B0099X3WY0 instant download after payment.

From the winner of the Orange Award for New Writers, an epic novel of childbirth - past, present, and future. "writers have matched her ruthlessly naturalistic depiction of modern childbirth as half farce, half horror story (The New Yorker)."

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 futuristic vision of technological oppression.

"Procreation in three disparate centuries and societies is the primal subject of a prize-winning British writer’s original second novel... Moving smoothly among gothic, naturalistic and futuristic modes and cross-connecting strands and ideas, Kavenna displays technical dexterity while offering a textured assessment - from the corporeal to the cerebral - of a totemic subject. Surprisingly affecting."  -  Kirkus Reviews

Original, beautifully constructed, immensely 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. It is also a story of rebellion, isolation and the damage done by rigid ideologies.