Mother Animal: In Conversation with Helen Jukes

‘Magnificent, utterly refreshing, captivating… I was electrified by Jukes’ gimlet-eyed telling of her own experience of new motherhood and the stories of parenting and nesting and birthing from our natural world.’ - Lucy Jones, Matrescence

When Helen Jukes becomes pregnant, the manuals she reaches for feel hollow; the well-meaning advice of friends oddly suffocating. With her body transforming, she’s left with urgent, unanswered questions.

So she looks elsewhere. Beyond humans, and into the overlooked worlds of polar bears, bonobos, burying beetles and a host of other creatures whose ways of mothering look very different to our own.

What she finds is both unsettling and electric: an expansive reimagining of care, instinct and what it might mean to be a mother – animal and human – today.