The Bluejay’s Dance

An exhilarating and enchanting meditation on becoming a mother from one of America’s most acclaimed writers, and winner of the National Book Award for Fiction, 2012.

‘She is a winter-spring baby, and all day there is just her, me, snow and the birds outside.’

A mother for all seasons, Erdrich tracks the end of her pregnancy into the dazzling light of childbirth and beyond into her baby’s infancy, keeping a weather-eye on Nature outside her window and inside her body, gauging its lessons and constraints. She spills over with the intense feeling a baby carries into being as its gift to its mother.

But her book is no mystical trip; Erdrich is umbilically attached to the earth, and to common sense. All prospective and seasoned parents will cherish her report from the frontline, for she never lectures, she simply strives to record exactly – in language both supple and ripe. Moving and memorable, neither handbook nor tract, here, for perhaps the first time, is mothering converted into writing without fakery.