ARM Book Club Bookshelf

Past and upcoming picks

ARM Book Club

Our book club meets online just four times a year, generally coinciding with the national meetings and publication of Midwifery Matters. This small but growing group allows for a lively discussion about the chosen title much like any other book club, except that our selections are specifically picked for their focus on women’s lives encompassing birth, midwifery or feminism. This facilitates a broad debate around wider issues as well as the opportunity to reflect on the writer and their skills with storytelling. Do come along even if you haven’t read the books, to enjoy a good old fashioned ARM debate – as always, all voices welcome. Book selections below.

Upcoming Picks

Winter’s choice: ‘Winter’s Child by Dea Trier Mørch (translated by Joan Tate):
The perfect choice for a seasonal read. Set on a maternity ward for complicated pregnancies, this novel follows women in the weeks leading up to and just after they give birth. As midwinter moves into the new year, the solidarity (I might say ‘sisterhood’) of the women is demonstrated beautifully as they negotiate the ‘mysteries of motherhood’ with its anxieties and joys.

Past Picks

Autumn 2025 choice: ‘Dream Count’
Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche’s Dream Count follows the lives of four women connected by blood and friendship and how they negotiate the world as females. It is a visceral sharing of the challenges and choices young women have but also reveals the misogyny that so often controls us. Most of the characters are middle class Nigerians and Ngozi Adiche demonstrates well how all women, no matter their advantages in life, ultimately cannot escape their sexed bodies.

Summer 2025 choice: ‘A Memoir’
For a more varied and less focused discussion, we will be asking attendees to bring along their own choice. This isn’t a completely open category, it is to share our favourite memoirs, but specifically those that are mother, midwife, birth or woman centred. It would be nice if we could share in advance either in the Discord group what we’ve chosen, or on our private Facebook page to start the discussions rolling. I already know what title I’ll be bringing along:

A Memoir Lady’s Hands, Lion’s Heart: A Midwife’s Saga by Carol Leonard
I highly rate this as a passionate reflection on the life of an (American) midwife, but it also shares most intimately her personal tragedy. No spoilers, but Carol Leonard is also an extremely witty woman (which some of you may know from Facebook and if you want a very funny, quick read, The Beauty Girls: A Floundering Woman’s Midlife Career Change to Beauty
School is an absolute hoot. She also wrote one of my favourites, The Women’s Wheel of Life with Elizabeth Davis which was reviewed in MM Spring 2024 Issue 180.

Spring 2025
Midwives: a novel of love, loss and tragedy, by Chris Bohjalian
I first read this book when it was published in the 1990s. It had caused quite a stir amongst my more radical friends in ARM. It’s a memorable story – not for the faint hearted – centred on a court case… I guarantee that this novel will divide opinions!

Ordinary Human Failings, by Megan Nolan

Books for Radical Midwives

Visit our online bookshop through Bookshop.org. We’ve gathered our favourite recommendations, now available to buy online. 10% commission goes to the ARM charity, 10% to support independent bookshops.

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