Listen free for 30 days

Listen with offer

Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.
Motherest cover art

Motherest

By: Kristen Iskandrian
Narrated by: Lauren Fortgang
Try for £0.00

£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £13.00

Buy Now for £13.00

Pay using card ending in
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.

Listeners also enjoyed...

This Bright Beauty cover art
A Scattered Life cover art
Little & Lion cover art
The Spring Girls cover art
The Best of Us cover art
Range of Motion cover art
Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See cover art
One Pink Line cover art
Best Kept Secret cover art
Glitter and Glue cover art
Cherry Blossoms cover art
Golden State cover art
Then Came You cover art
Best Friends Forever cover art
Heft cover art
The Time Traveler's Wife cover art

Summary

Marrying the sharp insights of Jenny Offill with the dark humor of Maria Semple, Motherest is an inventive and moving coming-of-age novel that captures the pain of fractured family life, the heat of new love, and the particular magic of the female friendship - all through the jagged lens of a fraying daughter-mother bond.

It's the early 1990s, and Agnes is running out of people she can count on. A new college student, she is caught between the broken home she leaves behind and the wilderness of campus life. What she needs most is her mother, who has seemingly disappeared, and her brother, who left the family tragically a few years prior.

As Agnes sinks into new romance, mines female friendships for intimacy, and struggles to find her footing, she writes letters to her mother, both to conjure a closeness they never had and to try to translate her experiences to herself. When she finds out she is pregnant, Agnes begins to contend with what it means to be a mother and, in some ways, what it means to be your own mother.

©2017 Kristen Iskandrian (P)2017 Hachette Audio

Critic reviews

"This is a book of wombs, physical and metaphorical, an exploration into the ways we make spaces to become ourselves - both divine and misguided - and what it means to be a daughter. Kristen Iskandrian's prose is both compulsively readable and structurally unique, investigating the mysteries of human feeling through a beautiful epistolary form." ( Melissa Broder, author of So Sad Today)
"Kristen Iskandrian is an utterly thrilling voice, and Motherest will slay you with its inventive, spiky, and heartrending investigation into the dark mysteries of family life - and the quest for a private identity within it. A smart, gorgeous, and singular debut." (Laura van den Berg, author of Find Me)

More from the same

What listeners say about Motherest

Average customer ratings

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.