It’s useful for a critic to be met, every so often, with a novel that gently, determinedly, requests a purity of care from the person holding it. Kate Briggs’s debut work of fiction is one such novel.
It concerns many things: centrally, a spring day in the lives of Helen and her newborn baby, Rose, after a sleepless night. Their lack of rest affords two modes of attention within the book. Working solely on adrenaline to push through the next 12 hours of childcare, Helen becomes an ontological conduit for the reader, a means of sizing up why the ordinary proceedings of her life (making a cup of tea, taking a walk, reading a novel, putting Rose down on a play mat) should occur; why they have meaning.
