8 New Books for Mother's Day 2025

The Adventures of Mary Darling

Nebula Award winner Murphy (The Falling Woman) riffs on both Peter Pan and Sherlock Holmes in this delicious romp purported to be written by Jane Darling, granddaughter of the eponymous Mary, as a corrective to J.M. Barrie’s “shameful” misrepresentation of events. When, in 1900, the Darling children vanish from their bedroom, their canine nursemaid, Nana, fetches parents Mary and George from a dinner party. For assistance, George calls in Mary’s uncle John Watson and his employer, the Great Detective Holmes, who takes the case—and eyes Mary as the prime suspect. Meanwhile, secretive Mary, who is aware of the existence of Peter Pan and hostile to Holmes’s intellectual snobbery, broods on how she can rescue her children. Drawing from her own past misadventures, during which she would often masquerade as a boy because Victorian sensibilities decreed too much “brain work” caused women to go insane, she springs into action. Though her husband proves unhelpful, and Holmes attempts to thwart her every move, Mary finds an ally in Sam, a Solomon Islander and former pirate, and together they make their way to a grim Neverland to face down a spoiled and near-feral Peter Pan. Murphy cleverly reworks favorite Victorian stories into something delightfully new. The wit, wisdom, and whimsy on offer here are sure to win fans. (May)

Cry When the Baby Cries

New Yorker cartoonist Barnicoat wrings hard-earned laughs from her experiences with motherhood in her wry graphic novel debut. She describes how her messy, painful pregnancy bears little resemblance to the images she sees on social media of flawless pregnant bodies, Instagrammable babies, and “aspirational” birth experiences (including “the dreamy water birth” and “the legend of the orgasmic dancing birth”). After her son is born via cesarean, she compares parenting an infant to a job where “sometimes the CEO will absolutely lose his shit and scream in my face for hours.” Reentering the adult world proves difficult in a society that makes little room for strollers or breastfeeding. Though she mines her experiences for comedy, designing games like the Wheel of Parenting Insomnia (spin it to land on a “new, terrible thing to worry about” like the “microplastics time bomb”) and Leaving-Your-Kid-at-Nursery Bingo (with squares like “guilt,” “Eau De Nappies,” and “why is the front door open?”), she’s frank about being depressed, exhausted, and often reduced to tears. Her loose ink-washed art suggests the humanistic style of Roz Chast, complete with charmingly drawn babies and hilariously frazzled self-portraits (Barnicoat frequently depicts herself wandering around the house in a half-naked, feral state). Parents will find much to identify with, and expectant parents would do well to heed Barnicoat’s warnings. Agent: Lindsay Edgecombe, Levine Greenberg Rostan. (Mar.)

Held Together: A Shared Memoir of Motherhood, Medicine, and Imperfect Love

In this moving debut, physician Thompson weaves an account of her complicated path to becoming a mother with recollections from colleagues, friends, and patients on their own experiences with parenthood. She recounts miscarrying, getting her right ovary removed because of an ectopic pregnancy, and anxiously monitoring whether her placental tissue would become cancerous as the result of a rare complication before giving birth to a healthy baby boy on her fourth pregnancy. Among other contributors, one mother describes the “roller coaster of heartache and disappointment” she felt through four rounds of IVF. Others focus on social rather than medical complications, such as the case of a woman who put her child up for adoption after getting pregnant as a high schooler. Elsewhere, contributors share unvarnished accounts of living with grief over an adoption that fell through and dealing with the disappointment of being unable to bear children after a life-saving hysterectomy. The varied selections prove there’s no single, “normal” route to motherhood, and throughout, the writers keep the focus squarely on the steep emotional toll of unsuccessfully trying to have kids (“Nothing could distract me from the obvious void. Everywhere I looked, women were snuggling babies in carriers,” Thompson remembers of the months following her miscarriages). This will be a comfort to anyone who’s experienced pregnancy complications. (Apr.)

The Names

Knapp’s intriguing and nuanced debut comprises three alternate story lines for a British family. After giving birth to a baby boy in 1987, Cora goes to the registry office to record his name. Her abusive husband, Gordon, wants the baby named after himself, her nine-year-old daughter thinks Bear would be a good name, and Cora prefers Julian. In each of the three parallel timelines, Cora assigns the baby a different one of the three names, and the lives of the family members unfold radically differently. In the Bear timeline, Cora and the children are mostly free of Gordon, while in the Julian version, the children are raised by Cora’s mother in Ireland. When the boy is named Gordon, the three live under the father’s tyrannical rule. Minor characters in one timeline sometimes play major roles in another, as Knapp reveals which attributes are intrinsic to her characters’ personalities and which are more subject to outside influences. All three story lines twist and turn in surprising but logical directions, as Knapp provides insights into the ways familial pressure can prevent personal growth. Readers won’t be able to stop talking about this intelligent exploration of a single choice’s long tail of repercussions. Agent: Anna Stein, CAA. (May)

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Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age

Cultural critic Hess’s fierce and funny debut memoir is an astute document of pregnancy and parenting in the internet era. At the start of her pregnancy in 2020, Hess was wryly amused by the way targeted ads clumsily urged her to buy maternity clothes and quackish health supplements. Then a prenatal test informed her that her baby had Beckwith-Weidemann Syndrome, a growth disorder that increases risks of childhood cancers. Suddenly, her relationship to the internet shifted, her phone “feed[ing] me from its bank of dark materials” as she tried to search her way to safety. Overwhelmed by a plethora of “experts,” from free birthers to “medical mom” influencers who display their disabled children’s vulnerable bodies online, Hess gradually came to agree with child psychologist Alison Gopnik: no number of parenting “hacks” can sculpt the perfect child nor substitute for a healthy society. Bringing journalistic scruples to her explorations of eugenics, disability advocacy, and the algorithmic churn of life in the 2020s, Hess balances her own story with a broader portrait of the anxious buzz of the modern world. Parents will feel especially seen by this incisive and refreshing account. Agent: Jin Auh, Wylie Agency. (May)

Skin

This innovative and emotionally resonant debut from Versyp centers on two women fumbling through middle age. Esther is a sporadically employed art teacher, and Rita is her nude model, who struggles to connect with her teen daughter, Nastja, in the wake of her divorce. In loose-lined, expressionistic water colors that break out of typical panel structures, Esther and Rita’s friendship grows—awkwardly but genuinely—though neither is privy to the details of the other’s private life. (Those character moments, such as Rita opening a gift of holy water from her mother, are revealed in interstitial vignettes between the main narrative.) Raised to be humble and cautious, Esther takes a chance on love with Nico, only to become the other woman in his life. Meanwhile, Rita mourns her late mother, who taught her to be “hard” but whose afterlife spirit is gentler. Esther draws and cares for stick insects whose molting serves as a central metaphor (“Shedding skin isn’t without danger”), and she prefers sketching people’s “essences” over realistic still life. Her imagined sketches pop up in the margins, shot through with bright threads of red, such as when Nastja cuts into a Christmas sausage, and slices through her mother’s heart. Clement’s art intertwines seamlessly with the script and highlights the interplay between interiority and the characters’ public-facing selves. It’s a quiet but ultimately moving portrayal of the ways tenderness can triumph over isolation. (Apr.)

The Story She Left Behind

In this captivating outing from Henry (The Secret Book of Flora Lea), a children’s book illustrator searches for her mother, a renowned children’s book author who disappeared decades earlier. Thirty-year-old Bronwyn Newcastle Fordham disappeared from her home on the South Carolina coast in 1927, leaving behind an unpublished sequel to the novel she wrote as a precocious 12-year-old, which made her famous. In 1952, Bronwyn’s daughter, Clara, gets a mysterious call from Charles Jameson, a Londoner who’s just discovered a satchel in his recently deceased father’s library filled with papers belonging to Bronwyn. Among the materials is a letter stipulating the satchel must be hand-delivered to Clara. She and her asthmatic eight-year-old daughter, Wynnie, arrive in London during the Great Smog, and they accept Charlie’s invitation to stay at his mother’s Lake District home, where the air is clearer. Clara feels very much at home on the pastoral landscape and finds a romantic spark with Charles. Henry imbues her story with lush descriptions of the landscape and intriguing linguistic puzzles as Clara attempts to decipher Bronwyn’s dictionary of the invented language that was central to her work. Readers will be riveted. (Mar.)

The Wanderer’s Curse: A Memoir

In this tender and searching debut, Bon Appétit editor Choi explores her and her mother’s nomadic tendencies. After Choi’s mother divorced Choi’s father, she moved to Ketchikan, Alaska, in 2007—a city populated by “unusual folk who had settled, or stalled, on their way elsewhere.” Choi was initially baffled by the decision—and by her mother’s subsequent moves to seven different states over the next several years—but then she found herself on a similar path. First, she fled California for New York in college, hoping the city might “furnish me with an identity,” then she got fed up with Brooklyn and started a journey across the South. As Choi catalogs those moves—which led her to settle, finally, in Tulsa, Okla.—she comes to accept that she “was a walking Mad Libs variation of [her mother’s] identity crisis.” Interweaving childhood anecdotes that characterize her mother as a hard-nosed, eccentric matriarch with bits of Korean folklore, including an explanation of yeokmasal, the “curse” of the book’s title, Choi delivers a funny and relatable ode to the pleasures and pitfalls of calling many places home. It’s a promising first effort. Agent: Claudia Ballard, WME. (May)