My Wild and Sleepless Nights

My Wild and Sleepless Nights
Author: Clover Stroud
Publisher: Black Swan
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2021
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781784164119

'Raw, elemental and beautiful.' Telegraph 'This is quite simply the best book about motherhood I have ever read.' - Eleanor Mills in the Sunday Times Mother to five children, Clover Stroud has navigated family life across two decades, both losing and finding herself. In her touching, provocative and profoundly insightful book, she captures a sense of what motherhood really feels like - how intense, sensuous, joyful, boring, profound and dark it can be. My Wild and Sleepless Nights examines what it means to be a mother, and reveals with unflinching honesty the many conflicting emotions that this entails- the joy and the wonder, the loneliness and despair. MORE PRAISE FOR CLOVER STROUD- 'Clover's expertise is writing about family life in a way that feels both new and entirely familiar' - Pandora Sykes 'As tender, blazing, funny and unflinching as the love it describes. I want to give this triumphant book to every mother I know' - Rachel Joyce 'Stroud is always willing to rip open her very soul in order to reveal the truth about her life - and every time a woman tells the truth like this, it sets another woman free' - Elizabeth Gilbert 'I read in one greedy gulp and am still slightly reeling. Extraordinary writing... For mothers and those even vaguely interested in family dynamics it is fascinating' - Alexandra Heminsley Charting the course of one year, the first in her youngest child's life, Clover searches for answers to questions that many of us would be too afraid to admit to - not only about motherhood, but also about female sexuality and identity. Her story will speak to all mothers, and anyone about to embark on that journey.


The Wild Other

The Wild Other
Author: Clover Stroud
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2017-02-09
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1473630223

'Extraordinary. I've never met anyone who has read it and doesn't rank it as one of their favourite books.' DOLLY ALDERTON 'So fierce and brave and visceral and raw - will stay with me forever. I loved it.' ELIZABETH GILBERT 'Full of heart, bravery and adventure.' AMY LIPTROT SHORTLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE Clover Stroud grew up in rural Wiltshire surrounded by animals and family. When she was just sixteen her adored mother had a horrific riding accident which left her permanently brain-damaged, and suddenly Clover was left to fend for herself. She embarked on an extraordinary journey to heal her broken heart, courting men and danger through two marriages and five children. The Wild Other is a grippingly honest account of love, sex and travelling to the darkest edges of human experience and back again. Powerful and deeply emotional, this is the story of an extraordinary life lived at its fullest. 'There is so much richly evoked life here... beautifully written.' Cathy Rentzenbrink, The Times 'This redemptive memoir will steal your heart; it will return it bruised but emboldened.' Mail on Sunday


Sleepless Nights

Sleepless Nights
Author: Elizabeth Hardwick
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Total Pages: 145
Release: 2011-07-13
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1590174380

In Sleepless Nights a woman looks back on her life—the parade of people, the shifting background of place—and assembles a scrapbook of memories, reflections, portraits, letters, wishes, and dreams. An inspired fusion of fact and invention, this beautifully realized, hard-bitten, lyrical book is not only Elizabeth Hardwick’s finest fiction but one of the outstanding contributions to American literature of the last fifty years.


Wild Game

Wild Game
Author: Adrienne Brodeur
Publisher: Harper
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2019
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1328519031

On a hot July night on Cape Cod, at the age of 14, Brodeur became a confidante to her mother's affair with her husband's closest friend. Malabar came to rely on her daughter to help, but when the affair had calamitous consequences for everyone involved, Brodeau was driven into a precarious marriage of her own, and then into a deep depression. In her memoir she examines how the people close to us can break our hearts simply because they have access to them, and the lies we tell in order to justify the choices we make. -- adapted from jacket


The Shapeless Unease

The Shapeless Unease
Author: Samantha Harvey
Publisher: Grove Press
Total Pages: 124
Release: 2020-05-12
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0802148840

“Sleeplessness gets the Susan Sontag illness-as-metaphor treatment in this pensive, compact, lyrical inquiry into the author’s nighttime demons.” —Kirkus Reviews In 2016, Samantha Harvey began to lose sleep. She tried everything to appease her wakefulness: from medication to therapy, changes in her diet to changes in her living arrangements. Nothing seemed to help. The Shapeless Unease is Harvey’s darkly funny and deeply intelligent anatomy of her insomnia, an immersive interior monologue of a year without one of the most basic human needs. Original and profound, and narrated with a lucid breathlessness, this is a startlingly insightful exploration of memory, writing and influence, death and the will to survive, from “this generation’s Virginia Woolf” (Telegraph). “Captures the essence of fractious emotions—anxiety, fear, grief, rage—in prose so elegant, so luminous, it practically shines from the page. Harvey is a hugely talented writer, and this is a book to relish.” —Sarah Waters, New York Times–bestselling author “Harvey writes with hypnotic power and poetic precision about—well, about everything: grief, pain, memory, family, the night sky, a lake at sunset, what it means to dream and what it means to suffer and survive . . . The big surprise is that this book about ‘shapeless unease’ is, in the end, a glittering, playful and, yes, joyful celebration of that glorious gift of glorious life.” —Daily Mail “What a spectacularly good book. It is so controlled and yet so wild . . . easily one of the truest and best books I’ve read about what it’s like to be alive now, in this country.” —Max Porter, award-winning author of Lanny


Where the Wild Mums Are

Where the Wild Mums Are
Author: Katie Blackburn
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Total Pages: 36
Release: 2016-04-21
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0571321526

The day Mum didn't get dressed and went on strike, Dad called her 'a Wild Thing' and Mum said 'Cook your own dinner' and stomped off upstairs to have a bath . . . In this hilarious, touching homage to Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, a worn-out mum finds herself floating across time and space to the place where the Wild Mums are. Dazzled by her party tricks, they crown her Queen of the Wild Mums and try to entice her to join their conga . . . But Mum has just remembered who she loves best of all . . . Lovingly illustrated by the award-winning Sholto Walker, this little book is the perfect gift for baby showers, new mums - or any mum who's ever wanted to go on strike.


Wild Nights

Wild Nights
Author: Benjamin Reiss
Publisher: Hachette UK
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2017-03-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 0465094856

Why the modern world forgot how to sleep Why is sleep frustrating for so many people? Why do we spend so much time and money managing and medicating it, and training ourselves and our children to do it correctly? In Wild Nights, Benjamin Reiss finds answers in sleep's hidden history -- one that leads to our present, sleep-obsessed society, its tacitly accepted rules, and their troubling consequences. Today we define a good night's sleep very narrowly: eight hours in one shot, sealed off in private bedrooms, children apart from parents. But for most of human history, practically no one slept this way. Tracing sleep's transformation since the dawn of the industrial age, Reiss weaves together insights from literature, social and medical history, and cutting-edge science to show how and why we have tried and failed to tame sleep. In lyrical prose, he leads readers from bedrooms and laboratories to factories and battlefields to Henry David Thoreau's famous cabin at Walden Pond, telling the stories of troubled sleepers, hibernating peasants, sleepwalking preachers, cave-dwelling sleep researchers, slaves who led nighttime uprisings, rebellious workers, spectacularly frazzled parents, and utopian dreamers. We are hardly the first people, Reiss makes clear, to chafe against our modern rules for sleeping. A stirring testament to sleep's diversity, Wild Nights offers a profound reminder that in the vulnerability of slumber we can find our shared humanity. By peeling back the covers of history, Reiss recaptures sleep's mystery and grandeur and offers hope to weary readers: as sleep was transformed once before, so too can it change today.


Sleepless Nights

Sleepless Nights
Author: Amanda Heath
Publisher: CreateSpace
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2014-08-14
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781500837464

I've been living two lives for the past seven years. One with Victor and the other with Damien. Victor I've known all my life. When his parents died he even came to live with my family and I. I was so in love with him. It wasn't until years into our relationship I started to see the faults in him. Then he went off to Iraq. Damien was the bad boy biker at our high school. Even while I was with Victor, I couldn't keep my eyes off of him. Then I got on the back of his bike and I thought I finally found my home. Then Victor came back wounded. That was all five years ago and now those two lives and my two loves are starting to converge. I don't know who I am anymore and I don't know who I want to be with. Though these two guys won't let me be single for long. But one of them has gotten me into a lot of trouble with the mob. And now it's up to the other one to save me. And before you roll your eyes, that statement isn't what you think. You'll be surprised who the bad guy really is. I promise to find my happily ever after, even if it's at the Wrath MC clubhouse in the arms of an alpha biker or in the high society world where I was born and in the arms of my ex-army man.


Rooted

Rooted
Author: Sarah Langford
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2022-07-07
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 0241991838

An intimate and moving account of modern farming and our changing relationship with the land 'An honest look at the farming life today. Raw, earthy and inspiring' - Cal Flyn, author of Islands of Abandonment 'A beautifully written, incredibly timely book' - Clover Stroud, author of My Wild and Sleepless Nights When barrister and author Sarah Langford left her city life behind she found herself unexpectedly back in the world of farming. It was not how she remembered. Instead, she saw farmers dealing with very different problems to those faced by her grandfather, considered a hero for having fed a starving nation after war. Now farmers faced accusations of ecological mismanagement by a hostile urban media whilst battling extreme weather and political upheaval. Yet as Sarah learned how to farm and grew closer to the land, she discovered a new generation on a path of regenerative change. In Rooted, Sarah weaves her own story around those who taught her what it means to be a farmer. She shines a light on the human side of modern farming, and shows how land connects us all, not only in terms of global sustainability but in our relationships with our physical and mental health, our communities and our planet. 'Moving, startling, uplifting, galvanising and unsettling, this plainly beautiful book is one of those rare few that changes how you see the world around you' - Ella Risbridger, author of The Year of Miracles 'Heartbreaking and hopeful, this story of a farming revival has never been more important' - Esther Freud