BEST BOOKS ON... INFERTILITY
THE bestselling author suggests key novels to help you through the trickier times in life. THE curse of infertility is as cruel as it is random: so many people seem to fall pregnant when they don’t want to, or have children they’re not competent to raise, while all the time those who long for a baby to love are unable to conceive.
The injustice of it is enough to drive you out of your mind. As it does to the couple in M. L. Stedman’s The Light Between Oceans.
It’s 1918, in a lighthouse somewhere off Australia. The lighthouse keeper Tom is a good, moral man, a hero returned from the front, and his wife Isabel a strong, fine woman.
Lost in grief after a stillbirth, they are suddenly delivered a baby — a ‘gift from God’ washing up in a boat. Isolated from the rest of society by geography and the sorrow of their childlessness, they keep her as their own. It is only when they return to the mainland they realise the wrong they have done. As with all matters of heartbreak bravely borne, the cracks show when you must deal with the cheery insensitivity of others.
Poor Eliza, in Jane Gardam’s The Queen Of The Tambourine, is a woman almost deranged with loneliness: abandoned by her husband, loved by no one, childless from a ruthless hysterectomy in her youth.
She goes to her doctor, who’s ridiculous enough to congratulate her on that life-destroying operation: ‘Well done, well done, for getting rid of the nursery furniture, my dear. Best removed if not needed.’ It’s a splendid moment when the very proper Eliza tells him exactly where to go.
‘ You can always adopt . . .’ is something else people say, like it’s easy. Of course, it has its problems. But not in Ann Patchett’s Run.
In this warm novel, adoption is wonderful. Doyle and Bernadette take on two little boys and, when she dies, he has to raise them alone.
Doyle does his best, but after a chance meeting with their birth mother comes first a new tragedy and then another, small miracle. And out of all that trauma is born a patchwork family that is a joy to behold.