John Murray Press is excited to offer reading groups 10 finished copies of All My Wild Mothers, the debut book from Victoria Bennett.
About All My Wild Mothers
An intimate weaving of memoir and herbal folklore, All My Wild Mothers is a story of rewilding our wastelands and the transformation that can happen when we do.
At seven months pregnant, Victoria Bennett was looking forward to new motherhood and all that was to come. But when the telephone rang, the news she received changed everything. Her eldest sister had died in a canoeing accident.
Five years later, struggling with grief, the demands of being a parent-carer for her young son, and the impact of deeper austerity, life feels very different to the future she had imagined. A move to a new social housing estate in rural Cumbria offers Victoria and her family a chance to rebuild their lives. Constructed over an industrial site, at first the barren ground seems an unlikely place to sow the seeds of a new life.
She and her son set about transforming the rubble around them into a wild apothecary garden. Daisy, for resilience. Dandelion, for strength against adversity. Red campion, to ward off loneliness. Sow thistle, to lift melancholy. Borage, to bring hope in dark and difficult times.
Stone by stone, seed by seed, All My Wild Mothers is the story of how sometimes life grows, not in spite of what is broken, but because of it.
‘Lyrical and beautiful and feels like a haven in a cynical world – exactly the book we all need to read right now’ Catherine Simpson, author of One Body: A Retrospective, When I Had A Little Sister and Truestory
‘A book of passionate resistance to everything in modern life that wants us to stay neat and small and fearful’ Tanya Shadrick, author of The Cure For Sleep
‘An exciting new voice in nature writing’ Cal Flyn, Sunday Times Writer of the Year, and author of Islands of Abandonment and Thicker Than Water
How to get involved
To be in with a chance of winning copies of All My Wild Mothers Snow Hare to read and review with your reading group please log in and complete the survey by Wednesday 8 February.
If successful, each of your members will be expected to share a review on Amazon, Goodreads, Waterstones or the Reading Groups for Everyone website within six weeks of receiving the books. Please only pitch if you can commit to this.
