The Lucky Ones - Rachel Cusk

Five interlocking short stories with themes of parent-child relationships, identity, and family memories. I found two of them particularly compelling: Confinement, about a woman going into labour in prison, and Mrs Daley's Daughter, a bleak tale about a rather unpleasant woman struggling to cope with her daughter's post-natal depression as memories of her own difficult experience of motherhood, and the harsh way she treated her daughter as a child, seep to the surface and threaten to overwhelm her.

I was drawn to this because I'd enjoyed (if that's the right word!) the dark humour of her rather gruelling account of becoming a mother, A Life's Work, and I wasn't disappointed. The difference was that whereas with A Life's Work I recognised myself in even the darker passages, and found it comforting to read about someone else having the same experiences, the comfort in The Lucky Ones came from feeling (extremely!) lucky not to be sharing the situations or feelings of the characters - in fact, reading about painful transitions to parenthood and difficult family relationships during the "honeymoon phase" of motherhood made me feel rather smug.