Soldier Sailor (2023)

Soldier Sailor is a brief but intense novel told by a mother (the titular ‘Soldier’) and addressed to her son (who she calls ‘Sailor’). Its not entirely clear from what remove it’s being written - the narrative jumps around so much that it’s hard to be certain - but it focuses on Sailor’s first two or three years of life, during which the narrator is practically fighting for survival as she struggles with the everyday demands of motherhood. She is left, like so many mothers, bearing virtually all of the work of bringing up her son, while her husband goes to work, watches football, and - most egregiously of all - sleeps. Through a series of traumatic vignettes (none more so than the novel’s opening section - in which she briefly abandons her child, having written a suicide note to him) we learn of Soldier’s despairing sense of alienation from the previous version of herself, who she sees as lost to the all-consuming mother who has replaced her. Throughout, though, there is also a near-unbearable sense of the desperate love of mother for child, culminating in a lyrical, beautiful final section in which Soldier contemplates their inevitable future separation: in spite of all the trauma of the present moment, the real source of fear in her life.