Inside Books: Mum’s the word

It’s Mother’s Day on Sunday and what could be a more thoughtful present for one’s mum than a good book? Especially a book that features a happy relationship between a mother and her child. Surely it beats an overpriced, overcrowded Sunday brunch out somewhere, or a bunch of panic-bought, petrol-station flowers?

With this in mind, I have racked my brains and scoured the bookshelves for some good motherly books to recommend. But I’m sorry to say I’ve come up with very little. The shocking fact of the matter is: literature seems to be nearly devoid of role-model mums.

At first I thought of recent books, alighting on The Blackwater Lightship by Colm Tóibín and Hideous Kinky by Esther Freud. Terrible mothers the pair of them. Lily in The Blackwater Lightship is mean, selfish and has utterly dysfunctional relationships with her two children, who barely speak to her. The mother in Hideous Kinky might be a well-meaning hippy, but she is so negligent that she gets her daughters to beg for her on the streets of Morocco.