Showing results by publisher "HarperCollins Publishers Limited" in Motherhood

When Cathy is told about Melody’s terrible childhood, she is sure she’s heard it all before. But it isn’t long before she feels there is more going on than she or the social services are aware of. Although Melody is angry at having to leave her mother, she also worries about her obsessively - far more than is usual. Amanda, Melody’s mother, is also angry and takes it out on Cathy at contact, which again is something Cathy has experienced before. When Amanda misses contact, it is assumed she has forgotten, but nothing could have been further from the truth.

From one of America’s greatest and most iconic writers: an honest and courageous portrait of age and motherhood. Several days before Christmas 2003, Joan Didion’s only daughter, Quintana, fell seriously ill. In 2010, Didion marked the sixth anniversary of her daughter’s death. Blue Nights is a shatteringly honest examination of Joan Didion’s life as a mother, a woman and a writer.

Steve Biddulph's Raising Boys was a global phenomenon. The first book in a generation to look at boys' specific needs, parents loved its clarity and warm insights into their sons' inner world. But today, things have changed. It's girls that are in trouble. There has been a sudden and universal deterioration in girls' mental health, starting in primary school and devastating the teen years. Steve Biddulph's Raising Girls is both a guidebook and a call to arms for parents.

A droll and dazzling compendium of observations, stories, lists and brief essays about babies. One August day a baby was born, or, as it seemed to Rivka Galchen, a puma moved into her apartment. Her arrival felt supernatural; she seemed to come from another world. And suddenly the world seemed ludicrously, suspiciously, adverbially sodden with meaning. But Galchen didn't want to write about the puma. She had never been interested in babies or in mothers before. Now everything seemed directly related to them.

Following Phyllida Law’s wonderful and acclaimed Notes to My Mother-in-Law - which comically and tenderly documented the author’s relationship with her husband’s mother who lived with the family for 17 years - we now have a chronicle of Phyllida’s relationship with her own mother who suffered from dementia. Recently widowed, bringing up her own two daughters (actresses Emma and Sophie Thompson), and working as a successful actress herself, Phyllida went up and down to Scotland to spend as much time with her ailing mother as she could manage.

It's Friday evening on the Canterbury Estate in Bradford, and Christine, who's been rushed to hospital by her friend, Josie, is on the maternity ward giving birth. She's 17 and terrified. Not just of the pain, which is ripping her in two, but because she knows that once the baby arrives, her family is never going to speak to her again. Her beautiful baby boy is about to start a chain of events that will lead to tragedy - and only her own family can save her.

In this wry, resonant and darkly funny memoir, journalist Grace Timothy explores a question most women will face at some point: if becoming a mother means the person you were before has gone, who exactly is left in its place? Best described as The Wrong Knickers for mums, in Mum Face Grace explores motherhood as an issue of identity.

Dog Soldiers tells the story of two brave young dog soldiers (army bomb dog handlers) killed in action in Afghanistan with their dogs by their sides, through the inspirational words of their mothers. Lance Corporal Kenneth Rowe and Lance Corporal Liam Tasker were both dog lovers from boyhood and went on to do the job they had always wanted to do.