Cirrus@Austlit

'You are fluid, composed of smoke or air, morphing between ectoplasm and skeleton. It is a dance, a cosmic strip show: a flash of spine, and then a rib cage, clean as a fish. Who is laying these bones down, bit by bit? Is it me who is making you, or are you making yourself?' When Anna Goldsworthy, pianist and perfectionist, falls pregnant with her first child, her excitement is tempered by the daunting journey ahead.

'In Welcome to Your New Life, she shares the dizzying wonder and crippling anxiety that come with creating new life. Should she indulge her craving for cevapcici sausage after sixteen years of not eating meat? Will her birth plan involve Enya or hypnosis, or neither? And just how worried should she be about her baby falling into a composting toilet?

'Goldsworthy's elegant prose has the charm of Sloane Crosley's writing (I Was Told There'd Be Cake), while her reflections on motherhood are every bit as frank as Rachel Cusk's (A Life's Work). Welcome to Your New Life disarmingly captures the shock of plunging into a life-changing adventure and the kicking required to return to the surface.' (Publication summary)