‘My mother lingered on the threshold between my life and my death, inhabiting it with the levity and nonchalance that had always marked her treatment of me.’

A young woman and her mother spend a day at the beach. Soon the woman is in labour, three months early. At the hospital she slips from the glare of the lights toward the deep shadows of her own childhood, while doctors and nurses fight to keep her and her baby alive.

Moving with dreamlike intensity between a heart-breaking past and a heart-stopping present, this fearless novel asks: in longing for a child do we also long to break free of a mother? And what was it that happened exactly, that day at the beach?