TheMothers

Born and raised in Southern California, Brit Bennett graduated from Stanford University and later earned her MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan, where she won a Hopwood Award in Graduate Short Fiction as well as the 2014 Hurston/Wright Award for College Writers. Her work is featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and Jezebel. She is one of the National Book Foundation's 2016 5 Under 35 honorees.

From the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Vanishing Half.

The Mothers is a dazzling debut about young love, a big secret in a small community and the moments that haunt us most.

All good secrets have a taste before you tell them, and if we'd taken a moment to swish this one around our mouths, we might have noticed the sourness of an unripe secret, plucked too soon, stolen and passed around before its season.

It's the last season of high school life for Nadia Turner, a rebellious, grief-stricken, seventeen-year-old beauty. Mourning her own mother's recent suicide, she takes up with the local pastor's son. Luke Sheppard is twenty-one, a former football star whose injury has reduced him to waiting tables at a diner. They are young; it's not serious. But the pregnancy that results from this teen romance - and the subsequent cover-up - will have an impact that goes far beyond their youth. As Nadia hides her secret from everyone, including Aubrey, her God-fearing best friend, the years move quickly. Soon, Nadia, Luke and Aubrey are full-fledged adults and still living in debt to the choices they made that one seaside summer, caught in a love triangle they must carefully manoeuvre and dogged by the constant, nagging question: what if they had chosen differently?

In entrancing, lyrical prose, THE MOTHERS asks whether a 'what if' can be more powerful than an experience itself.

'The Mothers has stayed with me since I first read it, the words and the intimacy of the prose seeping into my pores' Roxanne Gay

It's the last season of high school life for Nadia Turner, a rebellious, grief-stricken, seventeen-year-old beauty. Mourning her own mother's recent suicide, she takes up with the local pastor's son. Luke Sheppard is twenty-one, a former football star whose injury has reduced him to waiting tables at a diner. They are young; it's not serious. But the pregnancy that results from this teen romance - and the subsequent cover-up - will have an impact that goes far beyond their youth. As Nadia hides her secret from everyone, including Aubrey, her God-fearing best friend, the years move quickly. Soon, Nadia, Luke and Aubrey are full-fledged adults and still living in debt to the choices they made that one seaside summer, caught in a love triangle they must carefully manoeuvre and dogged by the constant, nagging question: what if they had chosen differently?

In entrancing, lyrical prose, The Mothers asks whether a 'what if' can be more powerful than an experience itself.

'The Mothers has stayed with me since I first read it, the words and the intimacy of the prose seeping into my pores' Roxanne Gay

'Wonderful - warm and tender and necessary' Yaa Gyasi

The Mothers is a beautifully written, sad and lingering book - an impressive debut for such a young writerBennett allows her characters to follow their worst impulses, and she handles provocative issues with intelligence, empathy and dark humour. Her risk-taking pays offBrit Bennett is rightfully being hailed a brilliant new voice writing about black women . . . This is a novel with heart - it made me feel; it made me think. And I can't wait to read more of herBrit Bennett's debut is often funny, generous, and brightly written[A]n engaging and assured debut novel of depth, and introspective power. It succeeds as a brilliant study of a modern black woman, and as a lyrical and majestic portrait of her place in societyBrit Bennett is so bracingly talented on the page. . .[The Mothers is] astute and absorbing and urgentA quite beautiful book: shimmering with intelligence; fully alive to both the joyful and the difficult part of love; illuminating on motherhoodTenderly writtenCompellingBennett has written that rare combination: a book that feels alive on the page and rich for later consideration. If you read The Mothers, you will learn a lotBittersweet, sexy, morally fraughtLuminous... engrossing and poignant, this is one not to missA refreshingly fast-paced story of young love, race, and religious hypocrisyWonderful - warm and tender and necessary