When Helen Jukes falls pregnant, she does what anyone else would do. She searches for information to help make sense of the changes underway inside her. But as the months pass and her body becomes increasingly strange, the pregnancy guides seem insufficient; even the advice of her friends feels oppressive.  So she widens her frame of reference, looking beyond humans to ask what motherhood looks like in other species. Here she begins a process of wilder enquiry, in which stories of spiders, polar bears, bonobos and burying beetles (among others) begin to unsettle and expand her notion of what mothering is; what it could be.   As she enters the sleeplessness, chaos and intimate discoveries of life with a newborn, these animal stories become Helen’s companions and guides. They allow her to explore where her own animality begins and ends and how the polluted stuff of human industry has come to influence life, even from its very beginnings.

A passionate, visceral and intimate account of a body changed, Mother Animal combines personal memoir with fresh insights from evolutionary biology, zoology and toxicology to ask the big questions that lie at the heart of what it means to be alive – and a mother – today.