The Long Answer

A young woman gathers intimate stories about pregnancy, motherhood, and the nature of female relationships, in this profound and provocative novel

‘The Long Answer is a triumph of human portraiture, as subtle as it is seething’ – Sunday Times

‘There were other women, how many other women, who had felt and wanted what I’d felt and wanted and felt and wanted differently too. Anywhere I’ve been and will go next, there they will be.’ Twelve weeks pregnant for the first time, Anna speaks to her sister on the other side of the country and learns she has just miscarried her second child. As this loss strains their bond, and complications with Anna’s own pregnancy emerge, her tenuous steps towards motherhood are shadowed and illuminated by the women she meets along the way, whose stories of the babies they have had, or longed for, or lost, crowd in.

The Long Answer is a stunning novel of secrets kept and secrets shared. Deeply empathetic and hugely absorbing, it unravels the intimate dynamics of female friendship, sisterhood, motherhood and grief, and the ways in which women are bound together and pulled apart by their shared and contrasting experiences of pregnancy, abortion, miscarriage and infertility.