Night Waking

About this book

Historian Anna Bennett has a book to write. She also has an insomniac toddler a precocious death-obsessed seven-year-old and a frequently absent ecologist husband who has brought them all to Colsay a desolate island in the Hebrides so he can count the puffins. Ferociously sleep-deprived torn between mothering and her desire for the pleasures of work and solitude Anna becomes haunted by the discovery of a babys skeleton in the garden of their house. Her narrative is punctuated by letters home written 200 years before by May a young middle-class midwife desperately trying to introduce modern medicine to the suspicious insular islanders. The lives of these two characters intersect unexpectedly in this deeply moving but also at times blackly funny story about maternal ambivalence the way we try to control children and about womens vexed and passionate relationship with work. Mosss second novel displays an exciting expansion of her range - showing her to be both an excellent comic writer and a novelist of great emotional depth.