View basket and checkout
Books Events Subscriptions Vouchers Contact

Mother Animal: A Memoir of Motherhood and Wildness

by Helen Jukes

Paperback £10.99
Published 26th February 2026
You’ll be able to choose Delivery or Click & Collect after you enter your address.
UK postage is £3.75, or free for orders over £60.

Available
online

Available
in Bath

Available
in Edinburgh

Available to order
in Ely

Available
in St Andrews

Description

*

From the author of A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings comes a beautiful and unexpected memoir of motherhood and wildness  ‘ASTONISHING’ (Sunday Times)

___

 

‘Magnificent, utterly refreshing’ LUCY JONES, author of Matrescence 

 

When Helen Jukes becomes pregnant, the manuals she reaches for feel hollow; the well-meaning advice of friends oddly suffocating. With her body transforming, she’s left with urgent, unanswered questions. 

 

So she looks elsewhere. Beyond humans, and into the overlooked worlds of polar bears, bonobos, burying beetles and a host of other creatures whose ways of mothering look very different to our own. 

 

What she finds is both unsettling and electric: an expansive reimagining of care, instinct and what it might mean to be a mother – animal and human – today

___

 

‘Joyful and expansive’ Guardian

 

‘Astounding … Read it to feel the slow detonation of mind-blowing understanding.’ Daisy Johnson, author of Sisters

 

‘Blows societal ideas about parenthood wide open.’ Marchelle Farrell, author of Uprooting

 

‘Honest and unflinching’ Stylist

 

‘A book to devour.’ Joanna Wolfarth author of Milk

Details

Mother Animal: A Memoir of Motherhood and Wildness
by Helen Jukes

ISBN
9781783968404

Publisher
Elliott & Thompson Limited

Binding
Paperback

Publication date
Feb. 26, 2026

Excerpt