Eleven Hours E-Book

Pamela Erens

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

'An immensely powerful, cannot-look-away novel of heart and bone and muscle and blood. The war novel has a rival... and it is breath-taking.' The Herald Lore arrives at the hospital alone: no husband, no partner, no friends. She is in labour. Franckline, a nurse in the maternity ward, herself newly pregnant, is assigned to her care. Over the spiralling course of eleven hours, the women are thrown together into a fierce, physical intimacy, and they begin to force one another to reckon with their pasts and their futures. Lore must disentangle herself from a love triangle; Franckline must move beyond deep traumas; both must prepare themselves for the fear, joy, anguish and awe of motherhood.

Leseprobe

For the billions of women who have been through it,one way or another.

CONTENTS

Chapter

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Pamela Erens

NO, THE GIRL says, she will not wear the fetal monitoring belt. Her birth plan says no to fetal monitoring.

These girls with their birth plans, thinks Franckline, as if much of anything about a birth can be planned. She thinks girl although she has read on the intake form that Lore Tannenbaum is thirty-one years old, a year older than Franckline herself. Caucasian, born July something, employed by the New York City Department of Education. Franckline pronounced the girl’s name wrong at first, said “Lorie,” and the girl corrected her, said there was only one syllable. Lore. Why a girl and not a woman? She arrived here all alone shortly before 9:00 AM, lugging her duffel bag, her tall body pitched to one side with the weight, no man with her, no mother, no friend (and yet a ring on the ring finger of her left hand: a silver band). No one at all, which is almost unheard of: even the homeless addicts sometimes have a man or a friend; even the prostitutes have friends who bring them in. But Lore Tannenbaum does not appear to be an addict or a prostitute. She is wearing clean sweatpants and a clean buttondown shirt; her walk, once she set down the duffel, was steady, even graceful; and at the desk she produced an insurance card.

The birth plan, emerging from the packed duffel, is several pages long, many sections, the points single-spaced. There is some sort of long prologue. Lore hands it to Franckline already turned to the correct passage on page 2: I do not wish to wear a fetal monitor. The monitor will restrict her to the area near the bed and she wants to be able to move about freely.