After Birth

A voluptuous, hilarious, scaldingly and exhilaratingly honest account of new motherhood, emotional exile, and the complex romance of female friendship. I'm a huge Elisa Albert fan, and in her latest she has perfected a tonal pivot that whips the reader from laughter to revelation in a sentence.

Karen Russell

After Birth is a fast-talking, opinionated, moody, funny and slightly desperate account of the attempt to recover from having a baby. it is a romp through dangerous waters, in which passages of hilarity are shadowed by the dark nights of earliest motherhood, those months so tremulous with both new love and the despairing loss of one's identity - to read it is an absorbing, entertaining, and thought-provoking experience..

Lydia Davis

Bukowski wrote that he preferred people who scream when they burn, and nobody burns, or screams, like Elisa Albert - a fiercely intelligent, dark and funny woman unafraid of her own anger.

Shalom Auslander

This book takes your essay about 'likeable female characters', writes FUCK YOU on it in menstrual blood, then sets it on fire. Then sets YOU on fire! Then giggles, then makes s'mores over your smouldering corpse.

Emily Gould

A deep, funny novel about the terrors and exhilarations of love in all its forms. Elisa Albert writes with startling clarity and furious wit about marriage, motherhood and friendship, illuminating these familiar landscapes with lightening flashes of illumination.

Jenny Offill

With After Birth, Elisa Albert has proven herself to be not only one of our most important novelists, but one of our most honest feminists. Darkly funny and impossibly wise, Albert creates a visceral sense of entrapment, a spot-on account of life as a woman. After Birth is dangerous, gripping, and essential - The Bell Jar of our time.

Diana Spechler

A visceral, raw, no-holds-barred account of the assault on the self that is first-time motherhood, this had me wincing (and laughing) in recognition. It’s very, very funny

Bookseller

Albert has made a novel that approaches depression and maternal anxiety with candid honesty, transforming writing on motherhood forever

Aaron Calvin, AskMen UK

Elisa Albert’s brilliant new novel…It’s obscene, reckless, vicious, hilarious and above all real…it ought to be as essential as ‘The Red Badge of Courage.’…Albert has inherited the house Grace Paley built, with its narrow doorways just wide enough for wit and tragedy and blistering, exasperated love.

New York Times Book Review

An entertaining take on the vicissitudes of female friendship

Carmela Ciuraru, New York Times

Captures our time with bracing, propulsive energy and brilliant honesty...Albert creates a deeply resonant and empathetic reading experience...exhilarating...Albert is virtuosic in capturing and maintaining barely concealed fury.

Jessica Roake, Washington Post

A hilarious, honest, and eye-opening book, this is a must have for any new mum or mum-to-be

Mummy Pages

Outrageous, funny and visceral

Viv Groskop, Red

visceral...the novel lands plenty of shocks through Albert's caustic presentation of the battleground of giving birth and society's patronisingly anti-feminist treatment of mothers

Sunday Times

A novel piercingly honest and funny, written from the heart, that takes us through a journey of physical trauma and psychological truth.

Xiaolu Guo

This explosive, angry, hilarious novel is the most accurate description of having a baby that I have read

Kate Saunders, The Times

Albert has given us a portrait of modern motherhood that will provide insight for some and provoke others. For others still, in its quieter moments, as it reaches for an honest way to talk about birth, it will be like that big old bell ringing in them, a reading process of recognition and reunion

Rozalind Dineen, Guardian

Funny and heartfelt

i (The paper for today)

Challenging, humorous and – tentatively – uplifting, it goes far beyond the usual explorations of what it is to be a mother

New Statesman