This is a frank and beautiful love story about motherhood. The only characters named in this novel are Soldier and her baby Sailor. The author captures the stress of being a new mother (being ‘a wounded soldier’) and the changing family dynamics with her husband. It is beautifully written and though often the reader will feel the tension of the narrator there are also moments of levity and humour.

I hadn’t read anything by Claire Kilroy previously and will now seek out her other novels.

Thanks to Faber and Netgalley for a review copy.

Brutally honest and deeply claustrophobic at parts, this book made me feel tense reading the narrator’s struggles with her new child and the lack of support she had with her husband (who was incredibly infuriating at parts as he kept shirking responsibility and getting involved with his child). It kept me intrigued as the narrator balanced precariously between coping and spiralling out of control, the only light sense of relief in the story is the introduction of her friend – his straight-talking to his children and kind attitude to her son allows her to feel a sense of joy.
Thank you to NetGalley and Faber & Faber for the advanced reading copy.

"Soldier Sailor" is a brutally honest story of the early years of motherhood that charts the highs and lows of one woman raising her child. It is written as a note to her son and does not hold back from the pressures that motherhood puts on bodies and relationships but even more so the way that those pressures mentally change the mother and can make you lose knowledge of yourself and who you are.

I found this book to be very poetic and easy to read, even if the subject matter was hugely challenging at times. It was also funny and sometimes, even as a non-parent, hugely relatable - the chapter about shopping in IKEA will resonate with anyone who has set foot in one of their stores!

My one criticism is that there is a very short chapter towards the end which deals with a crucial development in the relationship between the mother and her husband and then completely glosses over what happens in between this and the next chapter. It doesn't go into detail because the mother character says she doesn't want to dwell on it but she has already given a lot of detail on their relationship so it felt jarring not to find out more. I honestly thought my copy of the book had missed a section.

But otherwise I would definitely recommend this book. It certainly made me appreciate everything my own mother must have gone through bringing me and my siblings up. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read this book.

This is a poem, a letter, a self-explanation, a rant... a first-person narration addressed to him, the Sailor of the title. A baby boy who has become the reason of the war this new mother Soldier is fighting on all fronts with her selfhood, her body, her husband, her baby, her community, her future... We are privy to the thoughts of a woman who cannot cope, whose baby's cries kill her, whose exhaustion is sapping her old person into another one she does not recognise nor like.
A relentless narrative that charts the first three years in the relationship between this mother-soldier and this baby-sailor, with raw honesty, the novel gives us a compelling story of a very singular (yet universal) mother getting to grips with her new persona in a turmoil of inner discovery where fact and fiction, objective and subjective realities mix in a believable and jarring mix. The suffering and anger of Soldier (this young woman who is isolated, who definitely is depressed and yet goes on and on) can at times feel not fit for normal reading consumption - too repetitive in certain images and exhausting in the bleakness, but the artistic reasons for that are sound: we are made to enter a similar vicious circle to that of the protagonist from where to get out seems impossible. But progressively and magically she, we, do.
I am not a mother and yet I found the novel more and more interesting as it progressed and as the narrative, even if it IS about motherhood, allowed other thoughts to enter and be explored, the claustrophobia morphs into other states. Soldier's is also our inner voice heard by nobody (and not even addressed to a sailor) that inner consciousness where we are true just to ourselves is thoroughly well created and the inner rage I recognise... A text (a letter, a diary) beautifully written, with a subtle humour, radiant turns of phrase. An excellent, interesting and rather unforgettable creation. The title is fantastic in all its implications. The image on the cover gives also food for thought.
With many thanks to Faber via NetGalley for an opportunity to review this most unusual exploration before publication.

Not a book for the faint-hearted - this is a fearless book, courageous and raw in its account of the bonds of motherhood. Enjoy might be the wrong word, but an important book and well told by an author to be hugely admired and who has been missed. I'm taking one star away as this is not a holiday read but then that is not what the author intended.

Thank you, NetGalley for the ARC

'Soldier Sailor' is an exceptional new novel by Irish author Claire Kilroy written in the form of a monologue by a mother, Soldier, addressed to her young son, Sailor. Kilroy writes about the day-to-day realities of motherhood in raw, honest, often rage-filled terms.

Much of Soldier's rage is directed at her husband, who uses the excuse of work to absolve himself of most parenting responsibilities but is quick to pass judgement at Soldier's perceived shortcomings. Kilroy writes with startling originality about what it is like to be left alone with a small child; the door Soldier's husband closes on his way to work becomes 'a guillotine severing me from my world. Which is not to say that your father was my world, but that he was free to roam in my word, which we should now call his world, or perhaps the world, an adult place from which I'd been banished. Now I lived in you world. It was small.' When he returns, she asks him about his day and 'he embarked on tales of valour and derring-do from a distant galaxy.'

At the same time, Kilroy depicts the dangerously fierce love a mother feels for her child: 'We all go bustling about, pushing shopping trolleys or whatever, acting like love of this voltage is normal; domestic even. That we know how to handle it. But I don't.' This love is intensified by some of the heart-stopping moments encountered in the course of an ordinary day or night - a bumped head, a dropped knife, refusing to eat, raging fevers, frequent meltdowns. As Soldier remarks, 'this was freelance motherhood: struggling to contain your screams while struggling to contain my own, which were louder and angrier and scared us both.'

It's perhaps worth mentioning that the furious mood of the first half of the novel is lightened by the second half, particularly through Soldier's friendship with a stay-at-home father of three under five (who represents a stark contrast with Sailor's father.) There is also a huge amount of dark humour, often on the subject of gender inequality. 'Word of advice,' Soldier says to Sailor: 'don't leave all your washing to your partner. I couldn't bear for anyone to resent you. Especially someone under your own roof. You might be murdered in your bed.' Elsewhere she remarks that 'Little girls are so much more articulate than their male counterparts. But don't worry, Sailor: you'll still be paid more than them.' And there is an extended comic sequence involving a turnip whom Soldier affectionately addresses as Yorick. Soldier muses that she 'cannot be the first woman to wonder how many vegetables I have peeled. That figure should be displayed on our gravestones: This woman peeled however many tonnes of potatoes, let's hear it for Mrs Whatever! And her husband? Well, he just ate them.'

I have probably included more of Kilroy's words than my own in this review but that is just to show how astonishingly good the writing is. This novel is a masterpiece which should appeal to parents and non-parents alike. Thank you NetGalley and the publisher for sending me an ARC to review.

𝚂𝚘𝚕𝚍𝚒𝚎𝚛 𝚂𝚊𝚒𝚕𝚘𝚛 - 𝙲𝚕𝚊𝚒𝚛𝚎 𝙺𝚒𝚕𝚛𝚘𝚢 (𝟸𝟶𝟸𝟹)

⚠️ Themes of suicidal ideation, post-natal depression

I could not put this book down!! This is a short, intense read, a monologue of sorts by a mother identified as Soldier, who is coming to terms with life revolving around her newborn, Sailor, but she pushes on driven by love for her baby, while harboring growing resentment for her partner:

𝚃𝚑𝚒𝚜 𝚒𝚜 𝚕𝚒𝚏𝚎-𝚒𝚜-𝚜𝚑𝚒𝚝 𝚍𝚎𝚙𝚛𝚎𝚜𝚜𝚒𝚘𝚗. 𝙰𝚕𝚕 𝙸 𝚍𝚘 𝚒𝚜 𝚑𝚘𝚞𝚜𝚎𝚠𝚘𝚛𝚔 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚌𝚑𝚒𝚕𝚍𝚌𝚊𝚛𝚎 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝙸'𝚖 𝚜𝚕𝚎𝚎𝚙-𝚍𝚎𝚙𝚛𝚒𝚟𝚎𝚍 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚝𝚑𝚒𝚗𝚔-𝚍𝚎𝚙𝚛𝚒𝚟𝚎𝚍 𝚋𝚎𝚌𝚊𝚞𝚜𝚎 𝙸 𝚗𝚎𝚟𝚎𝚛 𝚐𝚎𝚝 𝚊 𝚖𝚘𝚖𝚎𝚗𝚝 𝚝𝚘 𝚖𝚢𝚜𝚎𝚕𝚏, 𝚗𝚘𝚝 𝚎𝚟𝚎𝚗 𝚒𝚗 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚝𝚘𝚒𝚕𝚎𝚝. 𝙸 𝚖𝚒𝚜𝚜 𝚖𝚢 𝚘𝚕𝚍 𝚕𝚒𝚏𝚎 𝚕𝚒𝚔𝚎 𝙸'𝚍 𝚖𝚒𝚜𝚜 𝚊 𝚕𝚘𝚟𝚎𝚛. 𝙸 𝚙𝚒𝚗𝚎 𝚏𝚘𝚛 𝚒𝚝, 𝙸 𝚍𝚊𝚢𝚍𝚛𝚎𝚊𝚖 𝚊𝚋𝚘𝚞𝚝 𝚕𝚎𝚊𝚟𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚢𝚘𝚞 𝚜𝚘 𝚝𝚑𝚊𝚝 𝚠𝚎 𝚌𝚊𝚗 𝚋𝚎 𝚝𝚘𝚐𝚎𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚛 𝚊𝚐𝚊𝚒𝚗. 𝚈𝚘𝚞'𝚍 𝚕𝚒𝚔𝚎 𝚝𝚘 𝚍𝚒𝚊𝚐𝚗𝚘𝚜𝚎 𝚙𝚘𝚜𝚝𝚗𝚊𝚝𝚊𝚕 𝚍𝚎𝚙𝚛𝚎𝚜𝚜𝚒𝚘𝚗 𝚋𝚎𝚌𝚊𝚞𝚜𝚎 𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚗 𝚒𝚝'𝚜 𝚗𝚘𝚝 𝚢𝚘𝚞𝚛 𝚏𝚊𝚞𝚕𝚝.

This novella by Irish writer, Claire Kilroy, is hard hitting, gut wrenching and heartbreaking. It’s all the feels. It will be all too relatable for some mothers, reassuring for others and off putting for mothers to be. Kilroy captures the essence of what day to day life can look like for a new mum and it’s not pretty.

Thanks to #netgalley and @faberbooks for the advanced e-copy in return for an honest review.

This is a pure outpouring of the clashing emotions of love, fear and protectiveness alongside the bone-shattering exhaustion of the early weeks and months of a newborn.
Powerfully written, it is a constant stream of Soldier questioning her ability to mother and expressing her resentment at her husband- who has been wholly unaffected by the arrival of the baby and swans off to work, demands lie ins and undisturbed nights and hot meals on his arrival home.
I suspect every single new mother could identify at least in part with Soldier as she battles to do her best by her son.

👩🏼‍🍼 REVIEW 👩🏼‍🍼

Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy

Publishing Date: 4th May 2023

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️/5

Claire Kilroy immediately immerses the reader in the life of a first-time mother, watching as she struggles to cope with the demands of her daily life as a mother and housewife. She struggles with the child and with her marriage, provoking questions on identity, autonomy, love, and worth.

In under 250 pages this book wrecked me beyond belief. I’m not one to cry at books, but this had me right on the edge. The complete raw emotion with which Claire Kilroy writes is staggering, and yet so realistic. The first person perspective immersed me so entirely in the protagonist’s consciousness that I almost felt that I was living her life. Despite not having children myself, I felt that this book touched upon all the worries I have about potential motherhood, without seeming overdone or clichéd.

I cannot recommend this book enough.

Be aware there are content warnings for this book surrounding motherhood and associated mental health.

I have mixed feelings about this book. It has a very dark start, which I found hard to get past as a new mother struggles with (probably) postnatal depression and abandons her newborn son. She immediately regrets this action and retrieves her baby with no harm done. However, her relationship with him and her love for him is slow and difficult.

There are moments of humour and I could absolutely relate to them as a parent myself: her envy of the woman in the street who managed to leave the house with 3(!) young children where our narrator cannot get out with just one. I expect every new parent is mystified how a little person needs to much 'stuff' packing before you can leave the house - a military operation would be easier to plan! The narrator's relationship with her husband is fractured, particularly apparent now that she is 'trapped' at home with her little charge. I found her husband's attitude to be a parent to be sadly very true and accurately portrayed in the main. I truly hope that for a large proportion of the female population they receive more support from their baby's father, but not in my experience.

The novel employs a stream-of-consciousness technique, which I did not always enjoy. It worked especially well in the bed-purchasing scene and when the baby is really ill in the middle of the night, but there were times when I truly had no idea what was going through this character's mind!

An interesting read and I am glad I made the time for it, but I am left with mixed feelings about how successfully it all hung together in the end.

A raw, powerful, emotional rollercoaster of a book, especially in the opening third. The chaotic, wondrous drama that enfolds when a newborn upends life and sanity is wonderfully depicted by Claire Kilroy. This author should win awards. Special thank you to Faber and Faber and NetGalley for a no obligation advance review copy.

This is an unimaginative tale of new mother finding her role more demanding than she can cope with. Her husband is little help. There is no excitement, just a recording of what parents already now. I see little point in it. I am unable to recommend it.

I found the early part of this book quite hard to read as the author was painting a very negative picture of motherhood. I put the book aside for a while, but then decided to give it another chance on a long flight. This was not a good idea as by the end of the story I felt really emotional.! The author paints a vivid picture of the undying love between a mother and her child.

Claire Kilroy has put into words the exhaustion, loss of self and bewildering shock of first time motherhood. The writing is brutally honest, harrowing but also sharply funny in parts. It wasn't easy to read and to be honest I feel that the relentlessness of the first half was too much - I put it down and almost didn't come back to it. For this reason I would find it hard to recommend but I look forward to reading other titles by Claire Kilroy. She certainly writes very well.
Thanks to Faber and Netgalley for the opportunity to read and review this novel.

How would I describe 'Soldier Sailor'? Only as the most intense expression of new motherhood I've ever encountered. This account, visceral and unwavering, puts that experience on a level playing field with any endurance test ever undertaken and really triumphs in asking how something so natural can be so hard?

The mother narrating the story is the Soldier of the title, knee-deep in the trenches and operating purely in survival mode, and Sailor is her boy child. I like that their actual names are withheld; this provides them with a universality that suggests that their experience is not unique to them but a common one.

Overwhelmed and exhausted and on the brink of collapse she is at times a risk to her child, to his safety, and yet somehow the idea coexists that she is his fiercest protector and will do anything for him. This idea is stretched to the point of suggesting the mother is the sacrificial lamb upon which the life of her baby depends. Meanwhile her husband continues with his normal life and regular routines and seems oblivious to the chaos that swamps them.

Author Claire Kilroy captures micro-moments of the struggle that are so real for the new mom but gain little by way of support or sympathy from any quarters but especially close quarters and that lead to resentment, seething resentment, threatening at times to crush the marriage. In fairness these do provide the novel's comedic moments (darkly comedic) and these are most successful in their descriptions of passive aggression:

'I took you back up. ‘He needs a nappy change.’
To which your father said nothing. It was the way he said it though.'

And no, this is not just an excuse for male-bashing. In fact, in a novel of very few characters a male Friend is introduced, a father of three young children and the main caregiver in his household carrying the responsibility load. More interestingly though, this 'Friend' provides Sailor with enough attention to get swept away in an emotional affair (a concept I never clearly understood until now).

With powerful prose and frightening insight and at just 240 pages this #goodbook shook me. I'm just not sure who I'd recommend it to as it may scare the living daylights out of them and halt the propagation of the human species.

Soldier Sailor is a monologue by the narrator addressed to her infant son wherein she describes in detail the unceasing demands of new motherhood, the terror, the helplessness and the overpowering love that accompanies it all. We watch the disintegration of her relationship with her husband and her dalliance with suicide, all of this culminating in a moment of madness that sees her and her child trapped on a beach at midnight as the tide begins to come in.

Throughout, the novel is written in poetic prose and towards the end it almost transforms into extended free verse. It’s this, along with the pin-point accuracy of Kilroy’s depiction of motherhood in an atomised society that give the novel its power. For me, however, the lack of a proper plot and the stream-of-consciousness technique make it a hard book to read. It’s unflinching and resonant but just a bit grim.

This is not a book you read to relax or have some good time. It's intense, heart wrenching, a rollercoaster and emotions.
It's also a book featuring a character I found hard to connect to because motherhood is such a visceral experience for her that you cannot share unless you experienced some of those emotions.
There's a lot of introspection, there's a lot of love for Sailor and quite realistic description of how you feel when pressure is too much and you break.
The author is a master storyteller and kept me reading this story even if I wanted to stop at times as it was too intense.
There were moments this could have been a DFN and other a 5* book. The rating is something I'm not sure but I surely recommend as it's a book you don't forget.
Many thanks to the publisher for this arc, all opinions are mine

Well Sailor. Here we are once more, you and me in one another’s arms. The Earth moves beneath us and all is well, for now. You don’t understand yet that what we share is temporary. But I do. I close my eyes and I understand.

Soldier has had a baby, Sailor, and her life has fallen apart. She no longer recognizes the woman she once was. She no longer recognizes her husband. She can’t work, can’t think and can’t accomplish the most basic tasks with any degree of confidence.

But first: an electrifying first 50 pages in which she leaves Sailor on a country path to be found and plunges into the woods with an unclear idea of killing herself and freeing him.

I saw in the small hours of Good Friday in a black rage, a malevolent force pacing the corridors of my own home. I was an exhausted woman exhausting myself further and I seem to have broken through some barrier that night because reality ceased to be reality, not that I understood that at the time. To my mind I had experienced a staggering revelation. Namely: I was just a woman. I was just a woman! How had this not registered before?

Her voice is digressive, scattered, leaping from one topic to another in a stream of consciousness address to the baby, but all the disparate topics are united by the life-and-death mundanity of it. At one point, revealingly, she recalls euthanizing her old cat:

Birth, death – you only get one shot. I got her death wrong and I cannot make it right. I know I’m talking about what I did to her to avoid talking about what I did to you but she sprang to my mind that morning because she had blindly trusted me too.

This opening section is simply wonderful. Unbearably tense and frequently hilarious.

The rest of the book is also very funny in its deadpan telling of interactions with children that make you want to kill yourself, and yet are entirely humdrum:

We made it onto the street.
We made it onto the street!
I put your hat back on. A hand reached up, pulled it off and tossed it overboard. I stopped the buggy, picked up the hat, put it back on your flossy head, set off. The hand reached up again and this time flung the hat. I unpicked it from the neighbour’s hedge.

Unfortunately, much of the rest of the book fails to gather steam in comparison to the gripping first section. The source of tension, or the needed rescue for Soldier, is her deteriorating relationship with her husband. We understand that it would be better if she and her husband could become united again after the baby. And while this is probably completely accurate in real life, it’s hard to get on board with this fictional representation, because the husband is simply odious. There are suggestions that maybe he's not as bad as the narrator is telling us, but since we’re in her head it’s hard to forgive him much. I also find the depiction of awful husband’s in books about mothers a little tiring. There are lots of awful husbands out there, but motherhood can destabilize your life even with the best partner.

The third section is an incantatory, prayer-like change of pace. There are some really powerful sections throughout the book. I found it most rewarding when Kilroy uses her wonderful flair for language to detach us from reality a bit, to embody the lived experience of daily life in more mythic terms, whether observing birds in the forest or walking through the incoming tide at night. These metaphors conveyed the sense of shift much better than marital bickering. Though there were some good scenes with the husband too, particularly a scene when he decides to demonstrate his masculinity by being an aggressive driver.

All in all a strong and interesting book. I wish it had been around in 2016 when I was joggling a newborn and googling, without much luck, “novels about ambivalence towards motherhood.”

I was held captive by this novel, not so much out of pure enjoyment ( although there was much to enjoy in the beautiful prose ) but because of its utterly absorbing depiction of motherhood, and its seismic impact on relationships, identity and the most dearly held values. it had the feeling that tragedy and disaster was only around the corner but ultimately its message was affirmative. A wonderful book. I have started to explore more works by this author.

I loved this brutally gut wrenching honest story of motherhood and its challenges . The author describes the life of a mother during the sleep deprived emotional muddle early months of her baby's life.
The author has a poignant ,poetic way of writing which suits this subject so perfectly .I was immediacy send back to this period of my own life and could identify so completely with the narrator as time and time again she expressed thoughts and emotions that I had felt myself
I loved the way that the baby boy had no name and was called Sailor throughout it somehow mode him feel more of an extension of the ,other's own body than a human in his own right
The novel is an emotional visceral read but somehow also manages ro be optimistic in that you feel as a reader if she can move forwards in a positive way from the experience so can you . In this way it is not a miserable read
As parents we strive to be prefect but life always allow this and somehow this book shows this
is possible . I think probably I wouldn't recommend to anyone about to have a baby as it might be too traumatic for them to read at that stage in life ,for those who have already gone through some of the experiences described it might be an easier read . likewise it might be a helpful book for partners to read particularly if they consider that their partner might be suffering fro post natal depression
I read an early copy on Netgalley uk the book is published in the uk on 4th May 2023 by Faber and Faber ltd
this review will appear one Goodreads , Netgalleyuk and my book blog bionicsarahsbooks.wordpress.com