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. 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

Clover's expertise is writing about family life in a way that feels both new and entirely familiar' - Pandora Sykes The best memoirists don't just tell us about their lives - they tell us something about our lives, too. And Clover Stroud is one of our finest contemporary memoirists. My Wild and Sleepless Nights - her pitiless examination of her life as the mother of five children - is a masterpiece. * Esther Coren * 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

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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. There are few other books about motherhood as brave, honest and beautifully written as this one' - Sarah Langford Stroud’s clear-eyed look at how wildness and domesticity have entwined in her life is both heartening and inspiring. Olivia Laing Beds have been made up with new fresh sheets and I have slept in them. I have dreamed of a life I wanted and then gone forward to create and live it. All this has happened in the everyday without me really noticing. But the moment before birth is quite different, as if it’s been crystallized: it’s the moment I can touch, when I can say, truly, yes, this life is happening to me right now. I ripped through it. Bravo brave Clover Stroud, who writes about raw and animal motherhood in a way that make sense to me. * Amy Liptrot *

I have been waiting for a book like this for a long time. Stroud captures the very essence of motherhood in all its contradictions - the brutal loveliness of what it is to mother another, and how the act of doing so breaks us open in ways both wonderful and terrible. There are few other books about motherhood as brave, honest and beautifully written as this one. Sarah Langford, author of In Your Defence Has writing it down helped? “I haven’t found it cathartic actually. I thought it would be quite therapeutic but in writing it down I have to recreate it in my head so it’s been quite a painful process and does have an immediate rawness to it.” I haven’t met anyone who doesn’t struggle with motherhood in some way however they portray themselves”Stroud was incredibly raw, honest and emotional with the reader throughout her book where sometimes it was to the point of being uncomfortable. She doesn't shy away from any subject matter and just shares everything. I always appreciate honesty in a person and it made me love my time listening to Stroud reading her book to me (as I had the audiobook). 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. Rare are the books about motherhood, rarer still; the true, the generous, tender, resonant ones. This is that book. I loved it and I love Clover’s voice. Sophie Dahl