Novelist Sarah Moss has expressed surprise at the relative lack of literature about parenthood. We are all children of someone, many of us parents too, and she finds it odd that so few representations of such a common experience exist.
In her 2011 novel Night Waking, she combines the story of Anna, an Oxford academic worn ragged by bringing up her boys, Raphael and Moth, with a historical investigation into infant mortality. It is set on a deserted Hebridean island, where her neglectful husband Giles – so lightly drawn, he is scarcely a character at all – is preoccupied by tracking the declining puffin population. The novel juxtaposes the messy business of 21st-century child-rearing with speculations on the parental attitudes of an even messier past.
