A free extract from the forthcoming satirical novel Rabbits in Switzerland.
With her free-floating twenties and thirties behind her, Luisa has dived head first into her dream job – as a midwife, bringing the miracle of new life into the world. 'Oh, you're a midwife?' so many people coo. 'That must be so rewarding.' Here is the recognition she always craved, the beginning of her life as a proper adult.
But here, also, is the flipside of reward. Where life-and-death responsibility mean it is not just labouring women who shit themselves before a birth. Where the perfectionist demands of new mothers are encased in ring-bound birth plans. Where, over the course of one nightshift the eccentricities of her demented colleagues and the creaking bureaucracy of the NHS drive Luisa to hysterical despair.
If this is her dream job, what exactly is this dream? What is the value of this working life, when it tramples all over her family, her diminishing social life, her sanity?
