Available Formats
Reproduction
By (Author) Louisa Hall
Simon & Schuster Ltd
Scribner UK
18th October 2023
22nd June 2023
United Kingdom
General
Fiction
813.6
Hardback
224
Width 135mm, Height 216mm, Spine 18mm
Compelling, elegant and bitingly smart, Reproduction left me reeling. It is playful and serious, witty and searing, inventive and heart-rending. I utterly loved it. Nell Stevens, author of Briefly, A Delicious Life
I read this novel in a single rapturous sitting, torn between the desire to hurtle through its hypnotic prose and the desire to reread every perfect sentence. Reproduction exquisitely captures the lunacy of inhabiting an animal body with a human mind, and somehow manages also to be gross, funny, heartrending, and formally acrobatic. Louisa Hall is a singular talent and I am a devotee. Melissa Febos, author of Body Work and Girlhood
A brave and dynamic novel about the creation of life and art narratively free, compulsively readable, and true to life.
Tao Lin, author of Leave Society and Taipei
What a brilliant novel! I was moved, troubled, enchanted; hardly able to breathe as I read. Halls dazzling and original tale has the force of myth, embodying the monstrous challenges of reproducing in our strange new world. Andrea Barrett, author of Ship Fever and Natural History
Its taken me seven years of reading, and about a thousand more books, to be able to say once again: This is the best book Ive ever read. For one thing, Louisa Hall has written what is by far
the best depiction of childbirth Ive ever seen in print. In other pages, she has perfectly captured the hollow void of grief after the miscarriage of a wanted child. She has reminded me of the sometime-strangeness of living inside a womans body when it refuses to get pregnant when you want it to, or gets pregnant when you dont want it to. Ive also had the privilege of spending time with a deeply feeling, deeply observant narrator, and she has gifted me with a wise and revelatory view of these times. When I read this book again in ten years Ill surely be saying to myself: Yes, that is exactly how it was. Its a marvellous gift of a book. Claire Oshetsky, author of Chouette
For readers of Rachel Cusk, Jenny Offill, and Doireann N Ghrofa,a deeply intimate novel about pregnancy, birth, and artistic creation, by the Dylan Thomas Prize-shortlisted author of Trinityand Speak.
A woman begins work on a novel about Mary Shelley while pregnant for the first time. Recently married, she has just moved from New York to Montana.
As the woman writes, fragments of Shelleys story begin to detach themselves from the page. Moving through her reproductive years, Shelley endured a catalogue of losses painful beyond comprehension. Still, she wrote, conceiving Frankensteinin 1818.
The womans experiences of pregnancy, miscarriage and labour are traumatic and disorienting, especially in the context of political upheaval, climate crisis, and an ongoing pandemic.Finally, she gives birth to a daughter and together they emerge into another world.
Then a friend from the past reappears. Anna is a biochemist who has been struggling to become a parent, a scientist who sees everything as an experiment.How far will she go in her desire to bring a baby into being
A Frankenstein for the twenty-first century, Reproduction is a story of intense grief and transformative joy, and a powerful depiction of the emotional and physical costs of creating new life.
'Louisa Hall is a writer to be admired.' Kevin Powers, author of The Yellow Birds
Crystalline, utterly persuasive and transfixing. New York Times on Speak
Hypnotic . . . Hall has a knack for the precise, underwritten image. Guardian on Speak
Louisa Hall grew up in Philadelphia. She is the author of the novelsTrinity, Speak,andThe Carriage House, and her poems have been published inThe New Republic,Southwest Review, and other journals.She is a professor at the University of Iowa, and the Western Writer in Residence at Montana State University.