My Wild and Sleepless Nights: THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

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The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Stroud has hit the nail on the head in describing what life can be like with children, and the quiet struggles we have to swallow as a mother, for the sake of keeping the train moving.

Yes, it would be very beneficial for any married couple with children, but not all of us have the means to make it happen. But to keep ourselves on our toes, we have a rule that author gender is alternated, girl-boy-girl-boy, and the continents always rotated (with occasional glitches). Photograph: Chris Floyd/The Guardian View image in fullscreen A painful, wonderful world … Clover Stroud and family at home. This book was exquisitely tender whilst also being brutally honest about the challenges that loving small beings so fiercely, brings to your life.Had it been a book solely about teenage parenting and had it left more to the imagination/own experience relationship wise, I’d probably be giving it 5 stars.

At seven hours long, the audiobook was on the shorter side and I could happily have listened to another two hours at least. She has a live in nanny and was able to just go off in a weekend away with her husband to rejuvenate her marriage. It’s not about duty, or even about juggling the demands of kids and work; mothering for Stroud has more to do with hedonism and adventure, about escape, and exploring the outer limits of human experience. I was in tears from the first chapter, so many pages succinctly described my exact feelings in various moments - the fury of waiting after due date and batting off those "any sign? The discord between relationship with self and relationships as mother which I'm still growing into.We use Google Analytics to see what pages are most visited, and where in the world visitors are visiting from. The only thing I didn’t like, and which seems to be a trend in books I’ve read recently, is her references to drug taking in the past and intimate details of her relationships. I love how she isn't afraid to lay it all bare and admit she's making it up as she goes along, like so many of do. Eleanor Mills in the Sunday Times Mother to five children, Clover Stroud has navigated family life across two decades, both losing and finding herself.

Stroud briskly shrugs people off when they question the practicality of having a fifth baby (“I want messy”), and cheerfully admits that in many ways another child is the last thing they all need. For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin. The motherhood she describes is the very antithesis of the sanitised, smiling vision we are sold in washing powder ads. In her touching, provocative and profoundly insightful book, she captures a sense of what motherhood really feels like – how intense, sensuous, joyful, boring, profound and dark it can be. Reading this book felt like having the most honest and emotional discussion with one of my best friends.I’ve not enjoyed a book about motherhood more, it was beautiful and brilliant and I would recommend to all mothers. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.