Seven modern fables about the challenges of caring for a child

Anneliese Mackintosh's short story collection, Any Other Mouth, won the Green Carnation Prize. It was also shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize, Saltire Society's First Book Award, and the Saboteur Awards, and longlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. Her debut novel, So Happy It Hurts, was shortlisted for a DIVA Rising Star Award.

Her new novel is Bright and Dangerous Objects.

At Electric Lit, Mackintosh tagged seven dystopian novels about motherhood, including:

Sealed by Naomi Booth

An epidemic is infecting Sydney. Known as cutis, it causes people’s skin to seal up until they choke to death. Heavily pregnant Alice and her boyfriend, Pete, escape to a remote house in the Blue Mountains to start their family. But are Alice’s concerns about the epidemic founded? And is the countryside more inhospitable than the city?

Booth’s gripping novel explores the fears so many of us experience in pregnancy—of the strange being occupying our insides, the dangers the outside world poses to it, and the precarious barrier of skin separating the two. Exploring issues of trust and ecological disaster in a way that feels evocative of The Glad Shout by Alice Robinson, Booth takes her book to a thrilling and gory conclusion that is not the faint-hearted.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Page 69 Test: Sealed.

--Marshal Zeringue