Still Born, Guadalupe Nettel's fourth novel, explores one of life's most consequential decisions - whether or not to have children - with her signature charm and intelligence. Alina and Laura are independent and career-driven women in their mid-thirties, neither of whom have built their future around the prospect of a family. Laura has taken the drastic decision to be sterilized, but as time goes by Alina becomes drawn to the idea of becoming a mother. When complications arise in Alina's pregnancy and Laura becomes attached to her neighbour's son, both women are forced to reckon with the complexity of their emotions. In prose that is as gripping as it is insightful, Guadalupe Nettel explores maternal ambivalence with a surgeon's touch, carefully dissecting the contradictions that make up the lived experiences of women.

Praise for Guadalupe Nettel: Nettel offers her keen attention and sympathy to any living thing struggling to get by. --The New York Times Nettel has brilliantly found a form to contain the multitudes of what one body can hold. --Nick Flynn The gaze [Nettel] turns on madnesses both temperate and destructive, on manias, on deviances, is so sharp that it has us seeing straight into our own obsessions. --Le Monde Claudio's apartment faces a wall. Rising from bed, he sets his feet on the floor at the same time, to ground himself. Cecilia sits at her window, contemplating a cemetery, the radio her best companion. In parallel and entwining stories that move from Havana to Paris to New York City, no routine, no argument for the pleasures of solitude, can withstand our most human drive to find ourselves in another, and fall in love. And no depth of emotion can protect us from love's inevitable loss. In 2006, Guadalupe Nettel was voted one of the thirty-nine most important Latin American writers under the age of thirty-nine at the Bogota Hay Festival. She has lived in Montreal and Paris, and is now based in Mexico City. Her previous books include Natural Histories and The Body Where I Was Born.