The School For Good Mothers

Jessamine Chan Hutchinson Heinemann €18

Freshly divorced Frida

Liu is juggling new motherhood with a job in academia that she can’t afford to lose. When a run of sleepless nights leads to a ‘very bad day’, she dashes out to collect some papers, leaving 18-month-old Harriet home alone. The authorities swiftly intervene, sending Harriet to live with her father, and dispatching Frida to a dystopian reform school for mothers deemed inadequate. It’s a gripping debut – claustrophobic in its evocation of heartbreaking injustice, nightmarishly plausible in the tyrannical perfectionism that powers it.