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Overview
A haunting, indelible novel of collective grief, resistance, and the radical, life-affirming virtue of testimony
A. is an amateur translator, living alone in an unforgiving, late-capitalist metropolis. Adrift and burdened by debt following a medical trauma, she makes rent caring for a young boy who is not and could never be her own. Her nights are spent on the dance floor, chasing spontaneous connection. There, she encounters N., who shares her numbed state and sometimes her bed. Among N.'s meager possessions, A. comes across a slim book about an unnamed foreign town of disappearing boys. The book, Field Notes, documents the stories of a community of mothers who assemble to mourn their missing sons together. A. is transfixed by this collective chorus of primal grief, the mothers' preternatural strength, and their intuitive care for one another. When a near-assault stuns A. out of her inertia, she takes off for the city where Field Notes was written in search of its author and the end of the story. But A.'s digging leads her instead to the traces of a murdered poet, a mysterious woman whose legacy will intersect unexpectedly and pivotally with A.'s own life. Poignant and profoundly humane, Mass Mothering is told through layered voices, written fragments, and recorded testimonies. It is a luminous story of the mutuality of grief, the aftershocks of violence in a globalized era, and the world-bending force of a mother's love.Customers Also Bought
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Details
- ISBN-13: 9781250392619
- ISBN-10: 1250392616
- Publisher: Henry Holt & Company
- Publish Date: February 2026
- Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.4 x 1.2 inches
- Shipping Weight: 0.75 pounds
- Page Count: 272
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Sarah Bruni’s second novel Mass Mothering is an ode to mothers and their ability to transmute grief into collective resistance and remembrance. The narrator, known to readers only by the initial A., is stunned into a semidissociative state after a cancer scare requiring surgery removes one path to motherhood from her life. The time off for her treatment also costs A. her job as a language teacher for non-native speakers. This traumatic disruption causes A.’s path to cross with two individuals who impact her connection to and understanding of motherhood. In order to pay rent, A. takes on a job caring for R., a neurodivergent child whom she shepherds to and from a litany of appointments and to whom she reads bedtime stories once the appointments, and the day, are over. In public with R., A. feels like an “imposter” among mothers, “sniff[ed] out” by them on buses and in waiting rooms. She feels disconnected to the unnamed city in which she lives, too, convinced she will never belong. In order to decompress from it all, A. goes dancing, and one night on the dance floor she encounters N., and the two bond through swapping stories of their origins. N. shows A. a book of field notes recording the oral history of a town where mothers search for answers regarding their missing and murdered sons. After N. betrays A.’s trust, she takes the field notes and journeys to the town from the book. In this land that so fascinates and moves her, A. works to reveal the secrets of the field notes and is forced to reexamine her own history as well. Mass Mothering positions mothers as both conduits for our collective past and cultivators of a freer, safer future, positing that in the face of state violence, raising children is an act of resistance. The novel is ambitious, touching on a number of subjects and illuminating each’s connection to the central themes in varying degrees of subtlety. Bruni balances the vagueness of certain details, like names and locations, with the immersive specificity of sensory descriptions of A.’s most personal experiences and thoughts. Mass Mothering will have readers questioning their own relationships to motherhood and motherlands alike.
Sarah Bruni’s second novel Mass Mothering is an ode to mothers and their ability to transmute grief into collective resistance and remembrance. The narrator, known to readers only by the initial A., is stunned into a semidissociative state after a cancer scare requiring surgery removes one path to motherhood from her life. The time off for her treatment also costs A. her job as a language teacher for non-native speakers. This traumatic disruption causes A.’s path to cross with two individuals who impact her connection to and understanding of motherhood. In order to pay rent, A. takes on a job caring for R., a neurodivergent child whom she shepherds to and from a litany of appointments and to whom she reads bedtime stories once the appointments, and the day, are over. In public with R., A. feels like an “imposter” among mothers, “sniff[ed] out” by them on buses and in waiting rooms. She feels disconnected to the unnamed city in which she lives, too, convinced she will never belong. In order to decompress from it all, A. goes dancing, and one night on the dance floor she encounters N., and the two bond through swapping stories of their origins. N. shows A. a book of field notes recording the oral history of a town where mothers search for answers regarding their missing and murdered sons. After N. betrays A.’s trust, she takes the field notes and journeys to the town from the book. In this land that so fascinates and moves her, A. works to reveal the secrets of the field notes and is forced to reexamine her own history as well. Mass Mothering positions mothers as both conduits for our collective past and cultivators of a freer, safer future, positing that in the face of state violence, raising children is an act of resistance. The novel is ambitious, touching on a number of subjects and illuminating each’s connection to the central themes in varying degrees of subtlety. Bruni balances the vagueness of certain details, like names and locations, with the immersive specificity of sensory descriptions of A.’s most personal experiences and thoughts. Mass Mothering will have readers questioning their own relationships to motherhood and motherlands alike.