That Kind of Mother: A Novel - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Rumaan Alam is the author of the novels Rich and Pretty, That Kind of Mother, and the instant New York Times bestseller Leave the World Behind. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Bookforum, and the New Republic, where he is a contributing editor. He studied writing at Oberlin College and lives in New York with his family.

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It’s 1985, and like many first-time mothers, Rebecca Stone finds herself equally overwhelmed and overjoyed by her newborn son.

Her husband is willing to abdicate child-rearing to her as he focuses on his career as a diplomat, so Rebecca is left on her own to juggle the demands of motherhood with her aspirations to be a poet. She aims to follow the example of Princess Diana—a personal idol, the living embodiment of grace and good humor.

But it’s not the princess who changes Rebecca’s life; it’s Priscilla Johnson, who comes to work as the family nanny. Priscilla brings order to the household even as her presence shakes up Rebecca’s perception of the world. As race once again becomes a flashpoint in American society, so too it becomes a deeply personal matter inside Rebecca’s cloistered and comfortable life—an opportunity to confront, for the first time, the blind spots in her own privilege.

Rebecca feels so profoundly connected to the woman who has taught her what it means to be a mother that when Priscilla dies unexpectedly in childbirth, it seems strangely natural for Rebecca to step forward to adopt the baby. But she is unprepared for what it means to be a white mother with a black son. As she soon learns, navigating motherhood will be a matter of learning how to raise two children whom she loves with equal ferocity, but whom the world is determined to treat differently.

With the same warmth and psychological acuity that defined his debut, Rumaan Alam has crafted a remarkable novel about the families we fight to build and those we fight to keep.