Gunk opens with new divorcee Jules sitting at home cradling a baby who is 24 hours and 17 minutes old, feeding him colostrum from a syringe. After being fed, the baby cries, which Jules interprets as a howl of rejection: “He has no language to tell me I’m not right for him.” We learn that Jules isn’t the child’s biological parent; the birth mother is Nim who, shortly after being stitched up, left the hospital ward and seemingly vanished. Concerned for her wellbeing, the hospital called the police who questioned Jules. “Nim has run away before,” she told them. “And she’s good at hiding.”
Set in Brighton, this is Saba Sams’s first novel, the follow-up to her much-admired short story collection Send Nudes. Where that book examined the lives of girls coming of age, Gunk has an older heroine in Jules, who is desperate to have a child. Her alcoholic ex-husband, Leon, who ran a student nightclub and with whom she tried and failed to conceive, cheated on her multiple times with his young staff. When one of the bartenders he slept with, Nim, discovered she was pregnant, she and Jules came to an arrangement and moved in together.
The narrator is the actor Lizzie Schenk, who imbues Sams’s protagonists with depth and humanity. A poignant tale of motherhood and partnerships reimagined, Gunk shows how life can be simultaneously messy and beautiful. For Jules, life had been “small and dark” before Nim “prised her way inside and detonated it. All around me were smithereens. I looked up, and found scraps of sky.”
Available via WF Howes, 4hr 25min
Further listening
Shouting Out Loud
Audrey Golden, White Rabbit, 12hr 42min
Golden narrates her biography of the seminal yet latterly underappreciated British band the Raincoats, who formed in 1977 and cast a long shadow over the careers of Nirvana, Bikini Kill and Sonic Youth.
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How to Lose Your Mother
Molly Jong-Fast, Picador, 6hr 55min
The daughter of writer Erica Jong documents her annus horribilis, when her husband was treated for cancer, her aunt and stepfather died and her mother, with whom she had a difficult relationship, was diagnosed with dementia. Read by the author.