Mother Animal : A Memoir of Motherhood and Wildness

Author: Helen Jukes

Memoirs

Published on 26 February 2026 by Elliott & Thompson Limited in the United Kingdom.

Paperback | 224 pages
129 x 198 x 16 | 166g

*From the author of A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings comes a beautiful and unexpected memoir of motherhood and wildness – ‘ASTONISHING’ (Sunday Times) ‘Magnificent, utterly refreshing’ LUCY JONES, author of Matrescence  When Helen Jukes becomes pregnant, the manuals she reaches for feel hollow; the well-meaning advice of friends oddly suffocating. With her body transforming, she’s left with urgent, unanswered questions.  So she looks elsewhere. Beyond humans, and into the overlooked worlds of polar bears, bonobos, burying beetles and a host of other creatures whose ways of mothering look very different to our own.  What she finds is both unsettling and electric: an expansive reimagining of care, instinct and what it might mean to be a mother – animal and human – today ‘Joyful and expansive’ Guardian ‘Astounding . . . Read it to feel the slow detonation of mind-blowing understanding.’ Daisy Johnson, author of Sisters ‘Blows societal ideas about parenthood wide open.’ Marchelle Farrell, author of Uprooting ‘Honest and unflinching’ Stylist ‘A book to devour.’ Joanna Wolfarth author of Milk