My Wild and Sleepless Nights: THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

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Hotjar sets this cookie to identify a new user’s first session. It stores a true/false value, indicating whether it was the first time Hotjar saw this user. The best evocation of the all-consuming, self-eroding reality of motherhood, while also being luminous with love. * The Sunday Times * And then Clover draws breath and adds: “But there are very few people my age who haven’t experienced grief and loss and yet we just don’t talk about it. People are scared by death I suppose. And I think it’s a conversation we need to have. She began writing the book after having Lester, her youngest, who is now four, often getting up at 5am to carve out time to write: “I became fascinated with the images of motherhood on social media. It seemed so competitive, people seemed so perfect or groovy or cliquey, rather than us all winging it together. And it made me question how I felt about motherhood and I decided to be really honest about it.” Brilliant – touching, tender, honest and so true. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything like it. It captures that hopeless sense of how much you love your children and how powerless you feel as they grow up and away from you. Eleanor Mills

Clover Stroud writes with precise intimacy and fearless honesty. She has somehow found a wholly original way to describe motherhood and, in doing so, truly conveys what it's like, in all its messy, sexy glory. * Hadley Freeman * A few weeks before Christmas, Clover's sister died of breast cancer, aged forty-six. Just days before, she had been given years to live. Her sudden death split Clover's life apart. The Red of My Blood charts Clover's fearless passage through the first year after her sister's death. My Wild and Sleepless Nights is not just about babies either, it’s about motherhood all the way up, her oldest child Jimmy having now finished university. But then I think your relationship with someone can continue after their death. I just miss her.” Clover and Nell

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This is quite simply the best book about motherhood I have ever read.' - Eleanor Mills in the Sunday Times A visceral story of pregnancy and domestic mayhem...[full of] raw primal maternal energy. -- Libby Purves * The Times * As well as finding comfort in a shared experience, memoirs can open our eyes to lives that as far from our own as possible and hopefully make us more empathetic as a result. Find a life story that speaks to you and reading it can be just as addictive as the best fiction. From older classics like Wild by Cheryl Strayed to new releases such as Untamed by Glennon Doyle, here 15 inspiring memoirs to add to your to-read pile. I haven’t met anyone who doesn’t struggle with motherhood in some way however they portray themselves”

What does being a mother really feel like? Clover Stroud’s powerhouse of a memoir gets closer than anything else I have read to answering that question. The motherhood she describes is the very antithesis of the sanitised, smiling vision we are sold in washing powder ads. There are no pastel colours here; Stroud’s mother-love is “as raw and rare as cutting through the soft dark crimson of uncooked liver”. When someone gives her new baby a stuffed toy monkey, she longs to surround him with more ancient and serious things: the Bible, The Complete Works of Shakespeare. The business of bringing a person into the world, after all, is not cute or clean or fluffy. My Wild and Sleepless Nights is part memoir of a year in the life of a mother of five and part exploration of the push and pull of motherhood. At forty-one, Clover Stroud finds herself pregnant with her fifth child, Lester, and the book takes place over his first year. At the same time, her oldest son, Jimmy, is a teenager who tests boundaries and questions the confines of life with a big, messy family in the middle of the British countryside. While Lester pulls her into his newborn world, Jimmy is pushing himself away from his mother. Along the way, Stroud seeks to answer the question: what does motherhood feel like? She is not trying to answer this question for all mothers, though she does include conversations she’s had with friends throughout the book. Rather, My Wild and Sleepless Nights is a deeply personal exploration of the feelings that motherhood inspires, both the highs and the lows. As Stroud puts it: “Nothing makes me as angry as motherhood does; nothing makes me as happy.” Nell died of cancer in 2019 aged 46. Clover and Nell were extraordinarily close, perhaps because of their rather dysfunctional childhood, so her death has devastated Clover and continues to do so.Brilliant - touching, tender, honest and so true. I don't think I've ever read anything like it. It captures that hopeless sense of how much you love your children and how powerless you feel as they grow up and away from you. * Eleanor Mills * As a motivation for creating new humans, this is not without its ethical problems. Stroud briskly shrugs people off when they question the practicality of having a fifth baby (“I want messy”), and cheerfully admits that in many ways another child is the last thing they all need. But the imperative of obliterating her own inner pain is more urgent to her than the imperative of giving time and attention to the children she already has. After all, where’s the fun in providing boring old steadfast support when you could be out there getting buzzed on oxytocin? When they grow up and write their own books, perhaps her children will tell us how her messiness felt to them. Brilliant motherhood memoir...Clover Stroud is one of the very best writers on the light and dark of motherhood and, if you enjoyed her debut The Wild Other, you'll love this. The book follows the first year of her fifth child's life as she juggles looking after a newborn with dealing with her teenage son's problematic behaviour. The writing is sublime and honest. Good Housekeeping

An honest look at the farming life today. Raw, earthy and inspiring' - Cal Flyn, author of Islands of Abandonment As someone with a huge maternal instinct, passion for working with children and life long aim of being a mother, I find anything about motherhood to be really interesting. Stroud's book was definitely interesting but it was so much more than that.I read in one greedy gulp and am still slightly reeling. Extraordinary writing... For mothers and those even vaguely interested in family dynamics it is fascinating. * Alexandra Heminsley * My Wild and Sleepless Nights examines what it means to be a mother, and reveals with unflinching honesty the many conflicting emotions that this entails: the joy and the wonder, the loneliness and despair. I wish I’d talked to Nell more about death, but by the time I brought it up it was too late; she was too close, she was looking at it right in the face, And she died with so much courage” And I hope my children and anyone who reads this book realises that it only comes from a place of absolute love. Just love.” Clover’s children

Because to me she wasn’t Nell Gifford, she was my sister. A lot of people had a sense of what she was like, which had very little to do with what she was actually like, and how complex she was, and how her outward persona was different to her private life.”We hear about Stroud's own complex relationship with motherhood, the challenges facing her other children, her relationship with her partner, her sex life, how she is trying to balance work and family plus so many more things. BEST NON-FICTION OF 2020: Clover Stroud charts the highs and lows of motherhood in all their deep, dark glory. -- Sarra Manning * RED Magazine * Mother to five children, Clover Stroud has navigated family life across two decades, both losing and finding herself. In her touching, provocative and profoundly insightful book, she captures a sense of what motherhood really feels like - how intense, sensuous, joyful, boring, profound and dark it can be.