Eleven Hours - Tapa dura

This is an immensely powerful, cannot-look-away novel of heart and bone and muscle and blood. The war novel has a rival, and it is breathtaking. * Scotland Herald * Extremely compelling... surprising and intimate. Bottom line: Women are heroes. -- CupOfJo.com The book is fierce and vivid in its depiction of the exhaustion of the spirit and the rending of the flesh during childbirth... a tough and emotionally authentic story. * NPR * Erens flawlessly captures the experience of childbirth in Eleven Hours - the fear, the surprise, the other-worldly pain. * Chicago Review of Books * [With] exquisite prose... this novel's greatest achievement is its excruciatingly vivid depiction of what it is to grow and carry and deliver a child... Powerful-aesthetically and viscerally. * Kirkus * This precisely written novel vividly evokes the immediacy, the tedium, the pain and the terror of labour. Erens' compassion for her characters - the medics as well as their patients - draws the reader close into their lives, in the way that only really good writing can do. -- Jane Rogers, author of THE TESTAMENT OF JESSIE LAMB Eleven Hours is taut, spare and gorgeous... -- Roxana Robinson, author of SPARTA Deeply moving and radiantly written, Eleven Hours is a gorgeous, harrowing, and intensely urgent novel. Pamela Erens is a mesmerizingly smart and powerful writer - I can't stop thinking about this book. -- Molly Antopol, author of THE UNAMERICANS Pamela Erens [is] one of the most gifted fiction writers we have. This exploration of a woman's time in labor is at once gritty and graceful, harrowing and compassionate... Bravo! -- Robin Black, author of LIFE DRAWING Erens'... writing is candid without being sensational, detailed without being clinical... [An] admirable novel. * Wall Street Journal * Erens is such a gifted writer that... from the first sentence [she] seizes control of her intense, provocative and deeply rewarding high-wire act of a book. * LA Times * Pamela Erens achieves the extraordinary... a visceral story about an intensely painful experience that manages to be an intense pleasure to read. * Boston Globe * Pamela Erens has given us a vital, microcosmic, fundamental, riveting, distilled illumination of our most profound and misunderstood passage... As essential a novel as they come. -- Elisa Albert, author of AFTER BIRTH Erens evokes the layered experience of living in a body - its tides of memory, sensation, and emotion - like no other writer I know. -- Karen Russell, author of SWAMPLANDIA! I've given birth 5 times and Erens' opening sentence put me straight back in one of those little hospital rooms where personal autonomy is lost by degrees - what a beautifully written and powerful novel, and what a terrifying and moving climax. -- Carys Bray, author of A SONG FOR ISSY BRADLEY Erens beautifully evokes [labour's] insistent rhythms and protective deliriums... she has also written an indelible portrait of two women coming to terms with the desire, fear, crushing losses and fragile joys that have carved their lives * New York Times Book Review * She writes like a dream - deeply moving and utterly involving. -- Deborah Moggach

Eleven Hours is a visceral, vital, microcosmic illumination of the most pivotal moment of any woman's life: giving birth. With taut, sensitive prose, Erens explores the lives of two women in New York - one in labour, the other her Haitian midwife - to gracefully reveal the seminal moments that have led them to meet here, now, during childbirth. With this riveting, insightful and sometimes harrowing novel, Erens cements herself as one of modern fiction's most diverse and discerning authors.