A thrillingly blunt account of latest motherhood, Claire Kilroy’s Soldier Sailor has been shortlisted for the Girls’s prize, and finds its narrator addressing her child, whom she calls Sailor, as she experiences from life on the home coalface. Mixing the profound and the soul-sappingly mundane, she talks of her fierce love for her son whereas navigating the purgatory of laundry, mealtimes, child teams, journeys to the playground, damaged nights and exhaustion. In between relaying the routine of her days, she displays on her altered id – “I used to be only a lady! How has this not registered earlier than?” – and observes the inequity of life because the mom of an toddler the place the working world is “an grownup place from which I’ve been banished” and through which she has turn out to be an “indoor creature indentured to domesticity”.
The narrator is the Irish actor Simone Collins, who leans into Kilroy’s darkish humour and the protagonist’s compulsive frankness, which leads her to swear vociferously at her little boy – who by now’s almost two – after he wanders off in Ikea. However the villain of the piece is her lazy, tactless husband who, on getting house from work, heaps judgment on his spouse for her chaotic, frazzled state and who believes altering the occasional nappy qualifies him as an “concerned father”. When he suggests his spouse has postnatal despair, she duly erupts: “That is life-is-shit despair … I miss my outdated life like I’d miss a lover. I pine for it. I daydream about leaving you in order that I will be with it once more. You’d wish to diagnose postnatal despair as a result of then it’s not your fault.”
Soldier Sailor is accessible from Faber, 6hr 15min
Additional listening
Capote’s Girls
Laurence Leamer, Hodder & Stoughton, 10hr 25min
A gossipy group biography of the New York socialites, often called “swans”, who had been pals with Truman Capote, amongst them Lee Radziwill, sister of Jacqueline Kennedy, and political activist Pamela Harriman. Carrington MacDuffie reads.
The Kellerby Code
Jonny Candy, Bolinda Audio, 10hr 57min
Actor Jack Davenport narrates this Saltburn-esque story of homicide and social climbing set in an English nation home and revolving round a duplicitous outsider named Edward.
