Dead Babies and Seaside Towns

Dead Babies and Seaside Towns

by Alice Jolly (Author)

Synopsis

The world of dead babies is a silent and shuttered place. You do not know it exists until you find yourself there. When Alice Jolly's second child was stillborn and all subsequent attempts to have another baby failed, she began to consider every possible option, no matter how unorthodox. Dead Babies and Seaside Towns is a savagely personal account of the search for an alternative way to create a family. As she battles through miscarriage, IVF and failed adoption attempts, Alice's only solace from the pain is the faded charm of Britain's crumbling seaside towns. Finally, this search leads her and her husband to a small town in Minnesota, and two remarkable women who offer to make the impossible possible. In this beautiful book, shot through with humour and full of hope, Alice Jolly describes with a novelist's skill events that woman live through every day - even if many feel compelled to keep them hidden. Her decision not to hide but to share them, without a trace of sentiment or self-pity, turns Dead Babies and Seaside Towns into a universal story: one that begins in tragedy but ends in joy.

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More Information

Format: Hardcover
Pages: 432
Edition: UK ed.
Publisher: Unbound
Published: 02 Jul 2015

ISBN 10: 1783521058
ISBN 13: 9781783521050
Book Overview: How far would you go to have a baby?

Media Reviews
The miracle is that this powerfully written book is not only bearable but compulsively readable. It should be grim but it is absolutely not. Jolly's resolute determination to tell the whole, exhausting truth, however searing, emotional, unfashionable, unpalatable or savagely humorous, keeps is turning the pages, well into the night, and cheering her on. * Financial Times *
Her account is astonishingly moving and her prose nothing short of hypnotic. * Independent *
Beautifully written and brutally honest. * Sunday Times *
So beautifully written that you can't stop reading. * Woman and Home *
Alice's writing is so precise and courageous it transforms her grief into a deeply powerful sense of hope and defiance. -- Rowan Pelling
Author Bio
Alice Jolly is an award-winning novelist, playwright and teacher of creative writing. Her two novels (What the Eye Doesn't See and If Only You Knew) are both published by Simon & Schuster. Her articles have been published in the Guardian, the Mail on Sunday and the Independent, and four of her plays have been produced by The Everyman Theatre in Cheltenham. Jolly was awarded the 2016 PEN Ackerley Prize for Dead Babies and Seaside Towns, and in 2014 one of her short stories won the V.S. Pritchett Memorial Prize awarded by the Royal Society of Literature. Jolly teaches for the Arvon Foundation and on the Oxford University Master's Degree in Creative Writing. She has three children - a son, a daughter who was stillborn and a daughter who was born to a surrogate mother in the United States. Her home is now in Stroud in Gloucestershire.