This brilliant, brutally honest account of an exhausted mother is one of the finest novels this year
Tell me, men: when were you last split open from the inside?” asks the narrator of Claire Kilroy’s brilliant, angry, arresting new novel. She wants to know why her husband — slumped in front of Blade Runner, beer in hand — is more moved by the film’s closing speech about man’s mortality than he ever is by his exhausted wife and distressed baby. How is it that he can see something “noble” and “epic” in this very male cinematic moment while failing to recognise her “ennobling truth”, that she risked death to give life to their child?