August 7, 2006 – 4th estate/HarperCollins UK

I’m dancing through the house today, listening to The Clash and munching on fish and chips. Why? (Like I need an excuse to crank up The Clash…) Because it’s the pub. date for The Birth House in the UK!

And to kick things off, my UK publisher has some nifty pages to check out…
a little Q&A

and a reading guide

Best of all, I’ve been getting some amazing comments from readers “across the pond.”

I LOVE this book! It incorporates elements of everything that is important to women and midwives; a deep sense of community, joy and pain, laughter and frustration, stories of women’s lives, the knowledge that birth takes us to the edge of life and death and an immense respect for women’s power. It is beautifully written, the characters are compelling and, perhaps most importantly for those of us who attend home births when we are not reading books about it, it is so well researched that I never found myself being pulled from the story because I had spotted an error! In the same way that Miss B adds a bead to her necklace when she catches a baby, I will add The Birth House to my list of joyful books to recommend to women and midwives. Thank you!

Sara Wickham
Midwife, Author, Speaker
With Woman

Oh my. It’s been a long time since I’ve enjoyed a novel so much. Set in Canada at the beginning of the 1900s, this book follows the life of Dora Rare who learns the ancient art of midwifery from Miss B.. A doctor comes to town wanting to save women from the pain of childbirth offering an assortment of drugs. When a woman dies during childbirth, Dora is chased out of town. It is the author’s first novel and is nothing short of brilliant. I was completely gripped by the end of the first paragraph. Of course, the parallels between natural birth and medicalised birth are still as evident today, one hundred years later!
Veronika Robinson, Publisher & Editor ~ The Mother magazine

I should add…
When the Dutch edition came out, I wore my garden clogs all day and ate copious amounts of chocolate from The Dutch Canadian Shoppe. Yum!
BREAKING NEWS – I think the list on the left side of the following web page – LITERAIRE TOP TIEN – means the book is being embraced in The Netherlands! (# 10 for the week of August 7th – hurray, Droste chocolate for everyone!)