"Rest and be thankful" by Emma Glass (Bloomsbury Circus, 2020)

An audio book read by the author.

The female narrator, Laura, works in a ward for babies/children who need intensive care. When Danny's mother is told there's no hope she pukes over Laura, soaking through to her bra. The chapel's been transplanted into the hospital.

She isn't getting on so well with her partner (aka "You"), who cries into his beard and says he doesn't love her any more. Mess at work, mess at home. She feels something for a colleague, Wilf. She repeatedly sees a woman in black with hollow eyes - in dreams, in the ward, at stations, etc.

A father who stays at a baby's bedside keeps playing shoot'em'up video games.

She's told not to make tea for the doctors even though she wants to be kind, because they'll think it's her job.

A big crow attacks her, drawing blood.

She moves into a nurses residence, discovers that a friend lives there. At the end, back in the ward, she's holding a baby. Someone picks her up in a car, drives too fast through familiar country lanes, has an accident. She looks down at a broken bodied baby on the ground.

I can imagine readers being divided by the florid style. The early dream imagery doesn't attract me, and many of the similes aren't new. The best parts don't need flowery language. The "I wait for her because without her I'm going to drown" section drags on. That said, the narrator's stressed and tired and the streaming imagery often works. Here's a selection of frgaments that caught my eye, not always for good reasons -

• "grows like the skin on undrunk coffee, it is the colour of the underside of a picture frame"
• "We are all paper aeroplanes today, folding and unfolding, refolding to be sharper, to fly and succeed, but our aim is slightly off, one wing slightly bigger than the other, thrust into the air, tearing through the air, to wobble and nose-dive, and ripped up in the end because we didn't make it"
• "I take shelter at a bus stop, a shell within a shell"
• "To remain present and present myself"
• "my skin unzipped and my chest is open. My heart climbs up and clambers out on aortic arms, dragged ventricles" - a garish cartoon
• "my stomach sings to be fed"
• "tiredness is playing tricks but I'm tired of that now"
• "the sun is setting, a big round yellow egg yolk forked open and flowing, the last of the sunlight running into the canal, darkness dissolving the day"
• "I can't be whole with nothing. I came from nothing. I came from nowhere. I can be anywhere now"

Other reviews

• Boyd Tompkin ( Its galloping pace and breathless immediacy feel deeply, even scarily, authentic. Packed with echoes, assonances and internal rhymes, along with some verbal swerves and twirls that recall the prose work of Dylan Thomas (Glass also comes from Wales), her muscular language throbs with sinewy energy. )
• Goodreads