ARM Book Club

Having started the year with two non-fiction titles, we are proposing that our autumn and winter reads be fiction.
The final selection will be decided in early 2027 but here are a few ideas.
You are welcome to make other suggestions – email me as usual selkiewrite@gmail.com if you’d like to join – we also have a Discord group.

Of Woman Born by Adrienne Rich
Another non-fiction title but a feminist classic will be our read for the summer. Many of us have it on our shelves, and this is the perfect opportunity to actually read it cover to cover, or else revisit it in a more ad hoc way. Written from personal experience as woman, poet, feminist and mother, but revealing the experience as one of being determined by the institution which is imposed on all women. Rich excavates history, research and literature to create this narrative of such universal importance.

Midwifery Wisdom by Dr Sara Wickham
For the first Book Club read of 2027, we have chosen a non-fiction text which is aimed at both midwives and women in general. Written by Dr Sara Wickham, a midwife many of us know personally or at least have come across in her writings and birth activism online this book promises to be an informative and valuable read.
Billed as exploring the knowledge of experienced midwives over years of supporting women through pregnancy, birth and the postnatal period, it should provide us with a full bounty of ideas to discuss.

The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon
‘These markings of ink and paper will one day be the only proof that I have existed in this world. That I lived and breathed‘.
Maine, 1789: When the Kennebec River freezes, entombing a man in the ice, Martha Ballard is summoned to examine the body and determine cause of death. As a midwife and healer, she is privy to much of what goes on behind closed doors in Hallowell. Her diary is a record of every birth and death, crime and debacle that unfolds in the close-knit community. Over the course of one winter, as the trial nears, and whispers and prejudices mount, Martha doggedly pursues the truth. Her diary soon lands at the center of the scandal, implicating those she loves, and compelling Martha to decide where her own loyalties lie.
The Frozen River was inspired by the life of Martha Ballard, a renowned 18th-century midwife who defied the legal system and wrote herself into history.
I’d read an overview of Martha Ballard’s diary and life some years ago – A Midwife’s Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich – and knowing her story so well has made reading the novelisation like reading a much loved book over again. Whereas Ulrich’s book was fascinating, it was a slog at times to read – but Lawhon’s telling is a real romp, a page turner, a truly compelling read and I highly recommend it whether or not you join us at the book club.

A Life’s Work is Rachel Cusk’s funny, moving, brutally honest account of her early experiences of motherhood. An education in babies, books, breast-feeding, toddler groups, broken nights, bad advice and never being alone, it is a landmark work, which has provoked acclaim and outrage in equal measure.

Vanishing World by Sayaka Murata
Amane is ten years old when she discovers she’s not like everyone else. Her school friends were all conceived the normal way, by artificial insemination, and raised in the normal way, by parents in ‘clean’, sexless marriages. But Amane’s parents committed the ultimate taboo: they fell in love, had sex and procreated. As Amane grows up and enters adulthood, she does her best to fit in and live her life like the rest of society: cultivating intense relationships with anime characters, and limiting herself to extra-marital sex, as is the norm. Still, she can’t help questioning what sex and marriage are for.

After Birth by Elisa Albert
“Sometimes I’m with the baby and I think: you’re my heart and my soul, and I would die for you. Other times I think: tiny moron, leave me the fuck alone.” A year has passed since Ari gave birth and still she can’t locate herself in her altered universe. Sleep-deprived, lonely and unprepared, she struggles through the strange, disjointed rhythms of her days and nights. Her own mother long dead and her girlhood friendships faded, she is a woman in need. When Mina – older, alone, pregnant – moves to town, Ari sees hope of a comrade-in-arms. Perhaps the hostile terrain could be more easily navigable together. 

Books for Radical Midwives