ARM Book Club
Are you interested and an ARM member? Email Lynn at selkiewrite@gmail.com and put ‘ARM Book Club’ in the subject line to confirm the date and join us. We also have a Discord group which is a place to discuss anything book related. Let her know in your email if you would like to join.
SUMMER
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.
AUTUMN
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.
WINTER
‘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 a man’s body is found frozen in the Kennebec River, midwife Martha Ballard is called to determine the cause of death. Months earlier, she had documented an alleged rape committed by two of the town’s most respected gentlemen—one of whom is now the dead man in the ice.
When a local physician dismisses the death as an accident, Martha investigates the murder herself. As the trial nears and prejudices mount, her diary—a record of every birth, death, and scandal in Hallowell—lands at the center of the case, implicating those she loves and forcing her to decide where her loyalties lie.
Books for Radical Midwives
