Soldier Sailor: 'One of the finest novels published this year' The Sunday Times

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I have probably included more of Kilroy's words than my own in this review but that is just to show how astonishingly good the writing is. It gets right into the imbalance in sharing household and child-rearing chores, not to mention the freedoms that the other half doesn't lose. It became a stick to beat myself with that I couldn’t just sit there and create, my brain was fried, I couldn’t remember sentences. By starting on a moment like this, you, the reader, might think you would never do something so awful to your baby, but motherhood pushes you. Come on,’ I said, rooting around for a clean tissue, but could only find your dirty one, which I used, ‘the birds have gone to bed.

It’s no surprise that a perpetual riff is the absence of fathers, who put in extra-long hours in the office just when their partners most need them at home. For a long time the mother worked in some financial area and had to perform in that arena while going to the toilet with her breast pump, I don’t know why that trickled away but it did. The parents of youths who rioted in Dundee overnight are “part of the problem”, the city’s council leader has said. I presume at some point my boy will read it and have some understanding of what motherhood is, be more aware of the challenges, the importance of it. President Macron has signed a series of energy deals with Kazakhstan in a bid to prise the country away from the Kremlin’s influence and secure nuclear deals vital to reducing Europe’s dependence on Russia.It sings with great authority about the wretched entrapment and molecular joy of motherhood, doing for Irish prose what Eavan Boland did for poetry. One of the most enjoyable parts of the book is the friendship the narrator rekindles with an old college friend, a man who looks after his three small children while his wife, a doctor, goes to work. Soldier Sailor is the dispatch she brought with her, poetry mined from the blood and dirt of the trenches.

UK: Rishi Sunak hosts talks with Kamala Harris, vice-president of the US, at No 10, followed by a private dinner; Harris also delivers a policy speech on the future of AI at the US embassy in London; Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer for England, speaks at the annual conference of the King’s Fund, a health think tank; start of Movember, the moustache-growing charity event held during November each year to raise funds and awareness for men’s health.As well as the emotional dissection, Kilroy is unrestrained when it comes to the physical toll of motherhood, asking at one point, "Why the burden fall on us, the females, with our ruptured bodies? The final section expands – abruptly, beautifully, agonisingly – to grapple with the true existential crisis at the heart of motherhood: the understanding, born with the baby, that we’re all time’s prisoners and “it will do us in in the end”. Here is Sailor in the playground: “You tottered around like the town drunk and I tottered after you like the town drunk’s mate. terrifyingly well-observed and articulated, often extremely funny, and there is a pleasure to be found even in the skewering precision of its despair. Nor was it a matter of joining the back of the queue and waiting for my turn to come around once more.

Many supporters voted with their feet, leaving long before the final whistle, simply too pained to watch any more of their team’s stumbling, bumbling, humbling efforts and the relentless crowing of the 7,000 Newcastle United fans. As a young woman, I distinctly remember passing women pushing prams, thinking that’s not going to happen to me.

It is also a stirring J’accuse – “Parenting is gender segregation” – addressed to a society where parenthood still all too often means motherhood. Soldier Sailor is an astonishing high-wire act: a narrative at once raw and polished, brutally funny and quietly devastating, every sentence a precision-guided missile to the undefended core of any reader who has endured the dislocation of early motherhood. The Impossible Creatures author discusses her love of Jane Austen and Shakespeare, the John Donne poem that saved her,.