Reading guide: Still Born by Guadalupe Nettel, translated by Rosalind Harvey
Discover our reading guide for Still Born, shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2023, which explores one of life’s most consequential decisions
Guadalupe Nettel’s gripping and insightful fourth novel explores one of life’s most consequential decisions – whether or not to have children.
Alina and Laura are independent and career-driven women in their mid-thirties, neither of whom have built their future around the prospect of a family. Laura has taken the drastic decision to be sterilised, but as time goes by Alina becomes drawn to the idea of becoming a mother.
When complications arise in Alina’s pregnancy and Laura becomes attached to her neighbour’s son, both women are forced to reckon with the complexity of their emotions, in Nettel’s sensitive and surgically precise exploration of maternal ambivalence.
Still Born was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2023, announced on April 18, 2023.
Guadalupe Nettel
About the Author
Guadalupe Nettel was born in Mexico and grew up ‘between Mexico and France’.
Rosalind Harvey
About the Translator
Rosalind Harvey is a literary translator and educator from Bristol, now based in Coventry in the West Midlands, UK.Watch our films
Two best friends share an aversion to “the human shackles” of motherhood, only to discover that life has other plans. With a twisty, enveloping plot, the novel poses some of the knottiest questions about freedom, disability, and dependence – all in language so blunt it burns
— The International Booker Prize 2023 panel of judges on 'Still Born'
