Mothertongues

There is no greater gift mothers can give one another than understanding and vulnerability. Mothertongues does both.

Jamila Rizvi

An odyssey of ideas, with the heart to match them – a book full of daring and insight.

Markus Zusak

A great rattlebag of a read, full of surprises, tales and ideas. A book that argues with itself. A book of close ups and wide views. Stimulating, funny and heartbreaking.

Paul Kelly

Motherhood can be luminous and infuriating. It can be deeply, intensely lonely. It can be a time of intense connection. It can be all of these things at once. Mothertongues is many things – an anthropological study, an artistic experiment – and most of all, a bold, exciting attempt to preserve the moments whose significance is fleeting and too often denied.

Bec Kavanagh, The Guardian

Pain, joy, rage, grief and ecstasy jostle in these pages. Moving from Shakespeare to Ionesco, from A.A. Milne to Aristotle, the reader is embraced by the pleasure the creators have had in constructing this text of feminist insights par excellence.

Carmel Bird, The Saturday Paper

This is above all a fun book, easy to read and written with love, sadness, passion, joy and intellectual gravitas.

Katherine Wilson, Sydney Morning Herald

Dovey and Bell seek to encircle the figure of the mother, striving to come ever closer to speaking her, even as they recognise that words are only partially suited to this task. They have another purpose beyond the artistic: to create connections of mutual recognition between mothers, so that the struggle may not feel quite so isolated and unacknowledged.

Carla Pascoe Leahy, The Conversation