★2016年英國筆會艾克理獎（Pen Ackerley Prize）得主！

為了有小孩，你願意付出多少代價？

死去小孩的世界是一個寂靜幽閉的地方。你不會知道它存在，直到忽然置身於此。

當小說家、劇作家愛麗絲．裘莉（Alice Jolly）的第二胎孩子不幸胎死腹中後，她做遍各種嘗試，不論多奇怪荒謬，無所不用其極就為了再有一個孩子，最後全都沒有成功。

《Dead Babies and Seaside Towns》記述了裘莉之後為了創造一個家庭，尋找替代方法的心路歷程，私密得近乎殘暴地敲擊心房。當她在流產、人工生殖、領養失敗等多次嘗試中受盡挫折，唯一能讓她從心力交瘁的苦痛中獲得慰藉的，就是英國逐漸凋零破敗的濱海小城鎮。最後，她與丈夫來到明尼蘇達的一座小城，遇到二位了不起的女性，讓這不可能的追求化為可能。

作者在這本優美的回憶錄裡，以充滿幽默、希望的筆調及小說家的技藝，精湛描繪女性經歷的種種生活日常，儘管許多人極力想將這些隱藏起來。然而她選擇敞開與讀者分享，絲毫不濫情，不自憐，使本書雖以令人心碎的悲劇開始，卻讓讀者在喜悅與生命的力量中闔上最後一頁。

 

Alice Jolly is a novelist, playwright and teacher of creative writing. Her two novels, What the Eye Doesn't See and If Only You Knew are published by Simon and Schuster and she was the winner of the 2014 V.S. Pritchett Memorial Prize for the best unpublished story of the year. Four of her plays have been produced by the Everyman Theatre in Cheltenham. She teaches for The Arvon Foundation and on the Oxford University Master's Degree in Creative Writing. She has three children – a son who is twelve, a daughter who was stillborn and a daughter who was born to a surrogate mother in the United States. She lives in Stroud, Gloucestershire and is married to Stephen Kinsella.

 

"The miracle is that this powerfully written book is not only bearable but compulsively readable. It should be grim but it is absolutely not. Jolly's resolute determination to tell the whole, exhausting truth, however searing, emotional, unfashionable, unpalatable or savagely humorous, keeps is turning the pages, well into the night, and cheering her on." (Financial Times)

"Her account is astonishingly moving and her prose nothing short of hypnotic." (Independent)

"Beautifully written and brutally honest." (Sunday Times)

"So beautifully written that you can't stop reading." (Woman and Home)

"Alice's writing is so precise and courageous it transforms her grief into a deeply powerful sense of hope and defiance." (Rowan Pelling)