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The Infertile Midwife: In Search of Motherhood - A Memoir by Sophie Martin

An insightful, moving memoir, capturing life working as a midwife in a busy NHS hospital at the same time as dealing with experiences of infertility, IVF and loss.

“A vital, heartfelt read for anyone navigating the rough seas of infertility and pregnancy loss.” – LEAH HAZARD

“This beautifully written tender book has for me, captured so much of what I experienced and when women share, it’s incredibly comforting and empowering… I hope [Sophie’s] book – as a medical professional, individual and mother – plays a part in the women’s healthcare revolution that the world so needs.” – MELISSA HEMSLEY

The Infertile Midwife

In Search of Motherhood - A Memoir

by Sophie Martin
Hardback | 31 August 2023 | Hardie Grant | £16.99

As a young married couple, Sophie Martin and her husband spent years trying to conceive. They went through several rounds of IVF, at great expense, and even travelled overseas for treatment, never quite knowing whether they would one day have a family. Alongside this, Sophie was working hard at a job she loved: looking after expectant mothers and newborn babies as a midwife in a busy hospital, where the patients’ daily new additions were a constant reminder of Sophie’s own setbacks in pursuit of motherhood.

The Infertile Midwife is a deeply personal, moving account of chasing something that you want so desperately. It also offers a much-needed look at how society treats infertility – from the language we use to the small talk we make – and the ways in which we can all do more to make things better for hopeful parents. With great warmth and honesty, Sophie shares her experiences of the bursts of hope and moments of great loss, but also the humour, love and joy that can be found in even the darkest places..

ABOUT Sophie Martin

Sophie Martin is a registered midwife and worked in a Central London hospital for ten years before moving to a hospital in Essex. Her wider experience of infertility and baby loss informs her practice and has led to her being approached by organisations such as Emma’s Diary and My Surrogacy Journey to provide a professional overview for them. For the past three years, Sophie has curated and delivered a series of online talks and interviews to coincide with Baby Loss Awareness Week. Her interview with Elizabeth Day on infertility and baby loss was watched 17,500 times.

Sophie lives in Essex with her husband and their young son.

Follow Sophie on @the.infertile.midwife

“Sophie’s words provide a supportive lighthouse of hope for many. She is gifted at starting and facilitating the conversations ensuring those who feel like they sit in the shadows of other people’s celebrations are supported, seen and validated. She holds up a microphone to the stories that need to be heard, generously sharing her own along the way.” ANNA MATHUR

“An important, insightful book for midwives and anyone interested in birth…Well written, deeply personal [it’s] a story that will resonate with many readers. This is an important story to tell, and highlights, also, the importance of language used around birth.” ANNA KENT Midwife, Aid worker, Author of Frontline Midwife

Talking points and feature ideas

  • The importance of language, and changes that should be made within the NHS – including how to talk about medical conditions without portioning blame or shame to the individual.

  • Training and support needed for healthcare professionals around babyloss and infertility.

  • Complex PTSD and support needed for midwives going through babyloss / infertility themselves.

  • Sophie’s story and her drive to become a midwife and how maternity services can have a deep and lasting impact on the experiences of families.

  • How to speak to families who are going through babyloss and infertility, and how to support friends or family who are living through this.

  • IVF and what to expect. What the process entails, both emotionally and physically.

  • Grief, trauma and the effect on the body.

  • How to cope with infertility and babyloss as a family – how men or the non-biological partner may experience loss.

  • Pregnancy after loss and the intense emotions and need for support during this time.

  • The reality of having a child after loss, and reaching bittersweet milestones.

For further information please contact:

EMMA FINNIGAN PR

07870 210468 | emma@emmafinniganpr.co.uk | @emmafinnigan | www.emmafinniganpr.co.uk

Twelve Moons by Caro Giles

Twelve Moons:
A Year Under a Shared Sky
Caro Giles
19 January 2023/ £14.99/ Hardback/ ebook/ audio

‘A multi-sensory experience of the natural world, which invites the reader to become both companion and witness in a timeless account of the power of the sea.’
- Katharine Norbury


TWELVE MOONS follows a year spent caught between the wild sea and the changing moon of the wide Northumberland skies.

Caro Giles lives on the far edge of the country, with her tribe of daughters: The Mermaid, The Whirlwind, The Caulbearer and The Littlest One. She is at once alone and yet surrounded. Bound by circumstance, financial constraints, illness and the challenges of single motherhood, she has nowhere to go but the fierce landscape that surrounds her.

Over the course of the year, the moon becomes her fellow traveller through dark times, and companion through joyful ones – and even when the sky is wreathed in cloud, the moon is still felt in the pull of the tides.

TWELVE MOONS follows the lunar calendar, each chapter sharing a month and a moon, and shows the simmering power that lies in our often hidden daily lives. A dazzlingly honest memoir that while never turning away from the awkward truths of life, also shows how love will flourish if we can only find a space for ourselves.

Set against windswept beaches and ancient hills, this is a story steeped in nature and landscape. Since our earliest days, mankind has looked up at the moon and seen a story reflected back. Twelve Moons is one of those stories – a book about finding yourself, your voice and a sense that even in the dark of the night, we are never truly alone.

ABOUT Caro Giles

Caro Giles is a writer based in Northumberland. Her words are inspired by her local landscape, the wide empty beaches and the Cheviot Hills. She writes honestly about what it means to be a woman, a mother and a carer and about the value in taking the road less travelled. Her writing has appeared in journals, press and periodicals and she was named Countryfile magazine’s New Nature Writer of the Year in 2021. She tweets @CaroGilesWrites.

The Best, Most Awful Job Edited by Katherine May

What does it mean to be a mother?

Twenty writers speak out in this searingly honest, diverse and powerful collection.

Best Most Awful cover front.jpg

The Best, Most Awful Job
Twenty Writers Talk Honestly About Motherhood
Edited by Katherine May
Elliott & Thompson / 19 March 2020 / £12.99 / HB

Motherhood is life-changing. Disorientating, overwhelming, intense on every level, it can leave you questioning everything you thought you knew about yourself. Yet despite more women speaking out in recent years about the reality of their experiences – good, bad and in between – all too often it’s the same stories getting told, while key parts of the maternal experience still remain unspeakable and unseen. There are a million different ways to be a mother, yet the vision we see in books, on screen and online overwhelmingly fails to represent this commonplace yet extraordinary experience for most of us. It’s time to broaden the conversation.

The Best, Most Awful Job is a deeply personal collection about motherhood in all its raw, heart-wrenching, gloriously impossible forms. Overturning assumptions, breaking down myths and shattering stereotypes, it challenges perceptions of what it means to be a mother, bringing together a diverse range of bold and brilliant writers and asking you to listen.

Some highlights include:

  • Hollie McNish on her trademark outspoken and sane form

  • Josie George writing beautifully and carefully about mothering yourself and your child when your body won’t play ball

  • Michelle Adams on meeting your adoptive child and learning to be a mother

  • Peggy Riley on the lost heartbeat of a deeply yearned-for child

  • Mimi Aye on the pain of her children being seen as ‘other’ in their own country

  • Leah Hazard - practising midwife and author of Hard Pushed - on the scars our bodies hold as mothers...

  • Stories also cover: being unable to conceive, step-parenting, losing a child, single parenthood, being an autistic mother, being a reluctant home-schooler and the many ways in which race, class, disability, religion and sexuality affect motherhood.

‘All the pain, power and privilege of being a mother is here in these tales of step-parenting; being unable to conceive; having six children; single parenthood; and of how race, class, disability, religion and sexuality affect our perceptions of motherhood’ - Caroline Sanderson, The Bookseller Editor’s Choice

ABOUT KATHERINE MAY

Edited and curated by Katherine May, an author of fiction and memoir whose most recent works have shown a willingness to deal frankly with the more ambiguous aspects of parenting. In The Electricity of Every Living Thing she explored the challenges – and joys – of being an autistic mother, and sparked a debate about the right of mothers to ask for solitude. In the forthcoming Wintering, she looks at the ways in which parenting can lead to periods of isolation and stress. She lives with her husband and son in Whitstable, Kent.

CONTRIBUTORS

Michelle Adams grew up in the United Kingdom, but currently lives in Limassol, Cyprus where she lives with her family and two cats. She has written two psychological thrillers, and her next release, Little Wishes, is a love story set in Cornwall, stretching across five decades of life. Michelle writes fulltime, and can occasionally be found working as a scientist.

Javaria Akbar is a freelance writer. She has contributed to The Guardian, The Telegraph, BuzzFeed, Refinery29, The Pool, Munchies, Vice, Dazed Beauty and more. She is also a part-time cookery writer and mother of two. 

Charlene Allcott is a graduate of the Penguin Random House WriteNow programme and author of two novels: The Single Mum’s Wish List and More Than a Mum. She was born in Croydon and now lives in Brighton.

British-born to Burmese parents, MiMi Aye has always moved between two worlds, and her life at home in the suburbs of London with her husband and two children is very different from the life spent with her family back in Burma. Her latest book, Mandalay: Recipes & Tales from a Burmese Kitchen, was described by Nigella Lawson as “a really loving and hungry-making introduction to a fascinating cuisine” and by Tom Parker-Bowles as “a glorious revelation … autobiography, history and recipes all rolled into one magnificent whole ... a brilliant, beguiling book". She is on Twitter and Instagram as @meemalee and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/itsmeemalee

Jodi Bartle is a New Zealander who has lived in London for nearly twenty years. In-between, she has written for Vice, i-D, Chanel, Quintessentially, Gaggenau, Selfridges, Sunseeker and The London Mother on photography, interior design, fashion, art, travel and babies, in both print and on-line form. She is currently part of the journalistic and editorial team at MCCA’s Diversity & the Bar, a US-based publication which highlights diversity issues in the legal profession, and spills all her embarrassing parenting stories via her blog theharridan.

Playwright, screenwriter and prose writer, Sharmila Chauhan’s work is often a transgressive meditation on love, sex and power. Her plays include Be Better in Bed, The Husbands (Soho Theatre), Born Again/Purnajanam (Southwark) and 10 Women (Avignon Festival). Both her short films (Girl Like You, Oysters) were produced by Film London and her feature Mother Land was long-listed for the Sundance Writers’ Lab. Sharmila also has a degree in pharmacy and a PhD in clinical pharmacology. She lives in London with her husband, son and daughter and cat Tashi. You can find her at www.sharmilathewriter.com

Josie George lives with her son in a tiny terraced house in the urban West Midlands. Her days are watchful, restricted and often solitary, in a large part because of the debilitating disability she’s had since she was a child, but also because she’s discovered that a slow, quiet life has much to teach her. Josie’s brave and singular memoir will be published by Bloomsbury in early 2021. In the meantime, she is working on a novel and writes blogs about her powerful and gently subversive way of looking at the world at bimblings.co.uk. You can find her on Twitter as @porridgebrain.

Leah Hazard is a serving NHS midwife, author of the Sunday Times bestselling memoir, Hard Pushed: A Midwife’s Story, and mother of two children. She lives in Scotland with her family and continues to write about the many wonders and challenges of women’s journeys to motherhood.

Joanne Limburg has published non-fiction, poetry and fiction. Her most recent books are the memoir Small Pieces: A Book of Lamentations (Atlantic Books) and the poetry collection The Autistic Alice (Bloodaxe Books). She lives in Cambridge with her husband and now-teenage son.

Susana Moreira Marques is a writer and journalist whose first book, Now and at the Hour of Our Death, was published in 2015. She was born in Porto in 1976 and now lives in Lisbon, where she writes for Público and Jornal de Negócios. Her journalism has won several prizes, including the Prémio AMI – Jornalismo Contra a Indiferença and the 2012 UNESCO ‘Human Rights and Integration’ Journalism Award (Portugal).

Dani McClain writes and reports on race, reproductive health, policy and politics, and is the author of We Live for the We: The Political Power of Black Motherhood. She is a contributing writer at The Nation and a fellow with The Nation Institute. Her writing has appeared in outlets including Slate, Talking Points Memo, Al Jazeera America, EBONY.com and Guernica, and her feature reporting has received awards from the National Association of Black Journalists and the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association.

Hollie McNish is a writer based between Cambridge and Glasgow. She has published three poetry collections, Papers, Cherry Pie and Plum, and one poetic memoir on politics and parenthood, Nobody Told Me, about which The Scotsman said: ‘The world needs this book”. Her next book, Slug: And Other Things I’ve Been Told To Hate, will be published in February 2021 and is a collection of poems, memoir and short stories. She normally likes her tea with two sugars.

Saima Mir is an award-winning journalist. She started her career at the Telegraph & Argus and went on to work for the BBC. She is a recipient of the Commonwealth Broadcast Association’s World View Award, and has written for numerous publications including The Times, The Guardian and The Independent. Her essay for the anthology It’s Not About the Burqa appeared in Guardian Weekend and received over 250,000 hits over two days. Her novel The Khan will be published by Oneworld in 2021.

Carolina Alvarado Molk was born in the Dominican Republic, and raised in Brooklyn, NY. She holds a PhD in English from Princeton University, and is currently working on a collection of essays about her experiences growing up undocumented.

Emily Morris is an author and freelance journalist from Manchester, UK. My Shitty Twenties, her memoir of single parenthood, was named a Guardian readers’ favourite book of 2017, and has been optioned for a TV series, which is in development. She is currently working on a novel.

Jenny Parrott is publishing director of Point Blank, the literary crime imprint at prize-winning independent publisher Oneworld, and she teaches creative writing. She also writes WW2-set sagas under the names Kitty Danton and Katie King, with series currently at Orion and HarperCollins.

Huma Qureshi is an award-winning author, journalist and blogger. Her journalism has appeared in The Guardian and The Observer, as well as several other national publications including The Times, The Independent and New Statesman. Her first book, In Spite of Oceans, a collection of short stories, won The John C Laurence Award from The Authors' Foundation. Her blog, Our Story Time, is a collection of her personal writing.

Peggy Riley is a playwright and writer.  Her novel, Amity & Sorrow, is about how we make families, however strange they might appear.  Her short fiction has been shortlisted for prizes including Bridport and the Costa Short Short prize.  Her work for theatre has been produced off-West End and on the fringe, on tour and in community, for radio and site-specifically.  Originally from Los Angeles, Peggy lives on the North Kent coast with a husband and an enormous golden retriever. You can find her at www.peggyriley.com

Michelle Tea is the author of ten books, the founder of literary non-profit RADAR Productions, the co-creator of Sister Spit, and the curator of Amethyst Editions, a collaboration with the Feminist Press. Her most recent book is Against Memoir.

Tiphanie Yanique is a poet, novelist and essayist, and Professor of English and of African American Studies at Wesleyan University. Born in the Virgin Islands, she lives in New Rochelle, New York, with her family. Her 2016 poetry collection, Wife, won the Bocas Prize in Caribbean poetry and the Forward Felix Dennis Prize for a first collection. She has written for publications including the New York Times, Best African American Fiction, the Wall Street Journal, and American Short Fiction.

Confessions of a Bad Mother: The Teenage Years by Stephanie Calman

We imagine the teenage years as a sort of domestic meteor strike, when our dear, sweet child, hitherto so trusting and innocent, is suddenly replaced by a sarcastic know-all who cruelly disregards the important wisdom we have to pass on. But with her characteristic unflinching honesty and bracing wit, Stephanie Calman debunks that myth.  

Confessions of a Bad Mother: The Teenage Years 
By Stephanie Calman 
Published in hardback by Picador on 16 May 2019 at £12.99 

Confessions of a Bad Mother: The Teenage Years by Stephanie Calman

Confessions of a Bad Mother: The Teenage Years by Stephanie Calman

When you’re pregnant you think: ‘I’m having a baby’, but you’re not. Inside that chubby exterior is a person who will eventually catch trains by themselves, share a fridge with ten strangers, go to a festival in Croatia without succumbing to a drug overdose, and one day, bring you a gin and tonic when your own mother is dying.  

Bad news: adolescence begins much earlier than you expect, around the age of seven.  

Good news! The modern teenager is a compassionate soul, the product of political correctness, Circle Time and all five series of ‘Friends’. 

Not quite so good news: the key insights you’ve gathered over four or five decades are still going to be brutally rejected, with a casual: ‘Like, whatever. Can I go now?’  

Stephanie takes a fresh look at this whole process and finds that her teenagers are frequently thinking and feeling the same thing as she is: that the other person has all the power and basically hates them. 

And having nurtured them through every stage of development, from walking to school by themselves to their first hangover, she finds herself dreading the separation – feeling bereaved even – as they skip off to university without a second glance. As the grown-up, you cannot let them see you in this pathetic state. It’s time to be brave and try to move on with your life. 

Talking points

  • Navigating the shift from teenage years to adulthood 

  • Dealing with the death of a parent, as a parent 

  • Preparing yourself for your children to flee the nest by dwelling on the bad times 

  • Are teenagers really so difficult, or have they had a bad press? 

  • How working from home as two freelancers helps promote benign neglect 

About Stephanie Calman

Stephanie Calman is the founder of the ground-breaking Bad Mothers Club website and the author of six previous books including the bestselling Confessions of a Bad Mother. She created the hit Channel 4 sitcom Dressing For Breakfast and has appeared on many TV shows including Have I Got News For You and The Wright Stuff.

She has also written for most British newspapers and magazines including the Daily Telegraph, Observer, Guardian, Cosmopolitan, GQ and Harpers & Queen, and has contributed to a wide variety of radio programmes, including Woman's Hour and The Today Programme. She is still married to the author Peter Grimsdale, whose latest book High Performance is also out on May 16. 

More information

For more information about this book, please don't hesitate to get in touch.