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Blythe Connor is determined that she will be the warm, comforting mother to her new baby Violet that she herself never had.

But in the thick of motherhood’s exhausting early days, Blythe becomes convinced that something is wrong with her daughter—she doesn’t behave like most children do.

Or is it all in Blythe’s head? Her husband, Fox, says she’s imagining things. The more Fox dismisses her fears, the more Blythe begins to question her own sanity, and the more we begin to question what Blythe is telling us about her life as well.

Then their son Sam is born—and with him, Blythe has the blissful connection she’d always imagined with her child. Even Violet seems to love her little brother. But when life as they know it is changed in an instant, the devastating fall-out forces Blythe to face the truth.

For fans of Verity and We Need to talk about Kevin, The The Push is a tour de force you will read in a sitting, an utterly immersive novel that will challenge everything you think you know about motherhood, about what we owe our children, and what it feels like when women are not believed.

The unnamed narrator of this dazzling novel escapes from Zanzibar to England knowing that he will probably never return. In his new country, things are not quite as he imagined – the school where he teaches is cramped and violent, and he quickly forgets how it feels to belong.

But when he meets a beautiful, rebellious woman named Emma, and when Emma, turns away from her white, middle-class roots to offer him love and bear him a child, the narrator chooses to hide his past from his new family and his present circumstance from his family back in Zanzibar.

Twenty years later, when the barriers at last come down in Zanzibar, he is compelled to go back. What he discovers there, in a story potent with truth, will change the entire vision of his life.