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.
WINTER 2026
‘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.
AUTUMN 2026
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.
SUMMER 2026
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.
SPRING 2026
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.
WINTER 2025
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.
AUTUMN 2025
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.
Books for Radical Midwives
