An electrifying collection of poems that makes your heart sing

Alongside the tender, heart-breaking moments, there's humour and a visceral energy. These poems transport you, there's something primal in their intimacy... Berry doesn't hold anything back with this collection, its beauty lies in her willingness to embrace the unspoken, the hidden...the wisdom and insight within its pages to be passed around amongst those finding their way into their new identity

Sure to be a comfort to many new mothers, a salve to the soul during a time of huge change

The Republic of Motherhood gives us poems of the greatest importance... This is writing to carry round with you, a pamphlet to open in a schoolroom, a hospital, on a train, in a street, and share its words, its great life and its love, with everyone you can

There was an electric charge to this pamphlet... It’s a pamphlet of love in darkness, full of poems which have something of the holy relic about them

Raw and beautiful

The Republic of Motherhood is a brilliant reflection of what it's like to become a mum and those first exhausting months

A beautifully presented pamphlet of poems about becoming a mother

St Aubyn is excellent on the characters’ psychology... powerful and moving

Malevolently enjoyable… The scenes that feel most real, interestingly, are those that are most fantastical, when we are drawn inside the chaos of Dunbar’s unravelling mind… Here the language feels sculpted and precise, Dunbar’s obsessive solipsism both violent and convincing… St Aubyn’s talent for brittle one-liners is as lethal as ever

In Mother’s Milk – the fourth Melrose novel, which was shortlisted for the Booker – St Aubyn gave a terrifyingly believable description of senility, and he applies the same skill here as his hero’s sense of time and his own sanity fall away with a tragic semi-awareness… He is at his funniest when describing characters at their worst. He narrates their terrible inner thoughts with a bleakly comic ironic detachment

As Dunbar wanders half-hallucinating in the Cumbrian wilderness, the only dialogue is between the mind and itself. A heartbreaking scrim of the broken and unspoken, image upon image flames up... Here, we can feel the writer feeling, and with Lawrentian clarity: a distillation of harrowed human pity

Lively… Beautifully written and caperish in tone, St Aubyn’s Dunbar plays the Bard’s story for savage laughs

Perhaps Edward St Aubyn’s most impressive achievement in this retelling…is to find a way of structuring the story so that it rattles along at a breathless pace from start to finish. Somehow, even though we know what’s going to happen…Dunbar is still a page turner… Even if you ignore all the intricate metatextual game-playing, this is still a magnificent book: a cautionary tale about what happens when people value power and money more than family and basic human decency, imaginatively re-tooled for our hyper-materialistic age

St Aubyn’s Dunbar is a salvific story of familial breakdown animated by decadently wicked rich people on the one hand and the fragile optimism generated by expensive psychotherapy on the other… St Aubyn, the laureate of upper-class depravity and brittle recuperation, is the perfect author for a waspish, satirical take on King Lear’s family melodrama… Dunbar does not take up the challenge of redrawing the play’s gender politics. St Aubyn produces a deftly understated Dover Cliff sequence and avoids the hyperbole of Gloucester’s blinding, domesticating the play’s sublime into an insidiously sardonic depiction of depraved twenty-first-century glamour

Hugely satisfying. Sensitive and sorrowful, it is also fast paced, sassy, and very funny… Another fruitful pursuit from the worthwhile Hogarth enterprise

The tale is the perfect vehicle for what this author does best, which is to expose repellent, privileged people and their hollow dynasties in stellar prose.

St. Aubyn’s resplendent rendering of nature’s grand drama and Dunbar’s shattered psyche, Florence’s love, and her sisters’ malevolence make for a stylish, embroiling, and acid tragedy.

Brilliant and heartwrenching

Hugely satisfying. Sensitive and sorrowful, it is also fast paced, sassy, and very funny... Another fruitful pursuit from the worthwhile Hogarth enterprise.

A psychologically acute look at power, dispossession and the ravages of old age... Caustically funny and full of fury, this is a devastating look at a family meltdown

Darkly comic… The intertextual prompts are nimble, and Dunbar’s painful wanderings through the snow re-enact something of the heath… An ambitious “take” on Shakespeare’s greatest play

This study of a modern, materialistic society and blood relationships, at once witty and devastating, is the perfect reading over any family Christmas.