Best books… Jessie Burton

The bestselling novelist and author of The Miniaturist chooses her favourite books about motherhood. Her new novel, The House of Fortune (Picador £16.99), is published this week These are all powerful books examining the estates of motherhood, womanhood and writerhood – however obliquely or directly. They have bolstered me in my own life as a writer, and in my new role as a mother:

Motherhood

by Sheila Heti, 2018 (Vintage £9.99), is a thoughtful, frank novel about a woman deciding in her late 30s whether or not to have a child. Intellectual yet conversational, it’s a meditation on responsibility and freedom, and the purpose of life itself. I found it extremely moving.

Making Babies

by Anne Enright, 2004 (Vintage £8.99). Joyous! Enright is a mistress of writing the beauty in the chaos of the early months, and as someone so good at capturing darkness, she is of course so very funny. With originality and truth, she perfectly nails the madness and simplicity of motherhood, the sublime and the banal, always lost in the usual “how-to” manuals.

The Rules Do Not Apply

by Ariel Levy, 2017 (Fleet £8.99). A gut-punch of a memoir containing some of the best writing I’ve ever read on loss, our appetites and greed for life, and Mother Nature in all her glorious, painful indifference.

Faces in the Crowd

by Valeria Luiselli, 2011 (Granta £10). A brilliant, short novel about a woman with two lives – her life before without children, and her life now, with – and the ghosts that are cropping up between. Dreamlike, phenomenally structured and a powerful portrait of being a writer and a mother at the same time.

Real Estate

by Deborah Levy, 2021 (Penguin £8.99). In this third part of her memoir, Levy is in search of space for the next chapter of her life, and so are her daughters. This is an incandescent piece of writing, balancing the love she has for her young women with the inexorable need for a woman to move forward and create. Can anyone do it like Levy? I don’t think so.