Ten top books about "bad" mothers

Peggy Frew’s debut novel, House of Sticks, won the 2010 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript. Her new novel is Hope Farm.

One of Frew's ten top books featuring the "messy intersection of the mother’s actual self with her role in the lives of her children," as shared at the Guardian:

Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward

Ward’s prose, graphic and vital, confronting and uplifting, transforms her dirt-poor Mississippi setting into something grand and mythic. Mothers, as with many myths, are central. There’s China the pit bull, birthing her puppies in primal, bloody glory in the opening scenes; Esch, the 15-year-old narrator, whose own mother is dead, and whose own pregnancy is unwanted and mostly unacknowledged; and there is Hurricane Katrina, “the murderous mother who cut us to the bone but left us alive, left us naked and bewildered as wrinkled newborn babies”.

Read about another book on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue