'Heart-wrenching, heart-warming and heartfelt' Adam Kay, author of This is Going to Hurt

Mother Ship

A dramatic, moving and life-affirming memoir about motherhood, the NHS and what it means to care

A heart-wrenching insight into what must have been such a fragile, overwhelming and terrifying time - yet there’s humour in there too. Beautiful

[Segal] writes with delicate eloquence, combining passion and comic understatement so deftly that this feels the only way the book could have been written… I don’t think I’ve turned the pages so urgently in a book about motherhood before

A beautiful memoir: wise, moving and profoundly humane. Segal writes with such exquisite clarity that each word is a gift, each sentence a votive offering. Mother Ship moved me to tears, but it also taught me the unassailable power of decency and kindness when life is at its most fragile and vulnerable. A book that left me changed for having read it

As gripping as a thriller and as moving as a love story

A compelling and emotionally taut exploration of what it means to be a parent in unexpected and challenging circumstances... The pages of Mother Ship are filled with love, anguish, despair and hope in the face of adversity. As a memoir, it is both insightful and moving; as a diary of 56 days in neonatal care, it is an exquisitely written paean to motherhood

I was bowled over by the beauty and terror of Mother Ship. I’m in awe of Francesca Segal’s honesty and courage, never mind her sublime, subtle writing. This is a vital, necessary book, not just about motherhood but about survival, care and the sustaining power of women in adversity

This is a marvellous humbling book about the fear and joy of giving birth to incredibly tiny premature twins. It's so tender, so moving, so blackly comic, and so involving your own heart beats fast as you read on.

[A] radiant memoir… Segal writes beautifully… Mother Ship stands out most of all for its refreshing absence of solipsism… Instead, she has written a paean to the depthless kindness of other people: the solidarity of fellow mothers who sustain each other with pastries and sound advice; the peerless machinery of the NHS, with its unsung army of workers… Segal’s writing…serves as its own restorative act of love

Francesca Segal is an award-winning writer and Mother Ship is a masterclass in style. A beautiful, lyrical memoir that navigates the unpredictable landscape of NICU and the will to survive.

Christie Watson, author of The Language of Kindness

Transcendent, moving, but thoughtful and necessary too, Mother Ship is its own miraculous achievement

Heart-wrenching, heart-warming and heartfelt – Mother Ship is a beautifully crafted, warts-and-all love letter to our wonderful NHS

[Mother Ship] deals with everything from libido to breastfeeding in a way that is simultaneously heart wrenching and deeply funny

Francesca’s writing is vivid and moving, bruised and beautiful, in this almost painfully tender account of precarious motherhood

Beautifully written and profoundly moving… A powerful, poetic and deeply affecting reminder of precious your life and health are

A gorgeously written account of the 56 days the writer Francesca Segal spent with her critically ill twin girls in ICU after they were born ten weeks prematurely. Part thriller, part love letter to her daughters and the NHS

A tender, truthful, heartbreaking meditation on motherhood. There are medical emergencies, worries and Francesca's constant guilt. But there's also love, and gratitude for the support of the NHS and her fellow mothers. Beautiful

I can't think of another book I have read recently that has made me laugh and cry so much. It is full of wisdom, and humour.

Even if I wasn't a new mother, I would have found Mother Ship absorbing and emotionally charged, but reading it in bursts while my own baby was napping, it was almost unbearably painful – and beautiful too. Almost every chapter brought tears to my eyes as we learned of the twins' hard-won developments. I'm so glad Francesca managed to capture this difficult time – her book is a beacon of hope.

I loved Francesca Segal’s luminous memoir. It captures so much of what it is like to have a baby in special care and to start being a mother not-at-home. It is so good on resilience, friendship and love

Mother Ship is a beautiful, poetic book about a different kind of motherhood, or at least a different start to motherhood that you don't hear as much about. It educated me about the shadowy other world of birth, that of severely prem babies... It's an exceptionally well-written memoir

[Segal] is a natural, fluent writer and, in this book, the reader will feel confident in her hands even as she explores a shattering episode in family life… Segal is brilliant at conveying the tedium and the trials of life in the ICU and beyond. In short, Mother Ship is simply compelling

Hopeful, harrowing…and darkly funny, Mother Ship has you laughing, crying and frantically turning the pages to discover how it all turns out

[Segal’s] words are a powerful, poetic and deeply affecting reminder of how precious are life, health and the everyday

Segal's moving memoir reveals not only what it takes to keep premature babies alive, but also what it means to be human and a mother

Mother Ship is a huge achievement for Segal, who has produced a memoir that promises to linger with you like a literary earworm… an extraordinary testament to the power of human survival

Vivid, fearless and inspiring… This is an intimate and electrifying memoir. It is a hymn to the sustaining power of women's friendships, and a loving celebration of the two small girls – and their mother – who defy the odds

A deeply moving, yet also witty and heart-warming account

[Segal] captures beautifully the complexities and contradictions of the human body

An ode to the companionship of the women on the neonatal ward in the darkest, most volatile days, it is moving but never mawkish

A song of praise to the beleaguered, indomitable NHS, with writing at such a pitch that it lingered with me all year

A heart-tugging account… this is one of the year’s most exquisitely written books

Francesca Segal is an award-winning writer and journalist. Her first novel, The Innocents, won the 2012 Costa First Novel Award, the 2012 National Jewish Book Award for Fiction, the 2013 Sami Rohr Prize, and a Betty Trask Award. Her most recent novel, The Awkward Age (‘smart, soulful and compelling’, Nick Hornby) was published in 2017.

'Heart-wrenching, heart-warming and heartfelt - Mother Ship is a beautifully crafted, warts-and-all love letter to our wonderful NHS' Adam Kay, author of This is Going to Hurt 
 
 After her identical twin girls are born ten weeks prematurely, Francesca Segal finds herself sitting vigil in the 'mother ship' of neonatal intensive care, all romantic expectations of new parenthood obliterated. 
 
As each day brings a fresh challenge for her and her babies, Francesca makes a temporary life among a band of mothers who are vivid, fearless, and inspiring, taking care not only of their children but of one another. 
 
Mother Ship is a hymn to the sustaining power of women's friendships, and a loving celebration of the two small girls - and their mother - who defy the odds. A comforting and encouraging read, especially for others enduring the same experience. 
 
 'A heart-wrenching insight into what must have been such a fragile, overwhelming and terrifying time - yet there's humour in there too. Beautiful' Giovanna Fletcher 
 
 'A beautiful, lyrical memoir that navigates the unpredictable landscape of NICU and the will to survive' Christie Watson, author of The Language of Kindness

The Awkward Age

The second novel from Costa prize-winning author Francesca Segal - a clever, sharp, funny and moving story about family, starting over and how much we let our children get away with

A very smart, soulful, compelling, elegantly written domestic novel

Francesca Segal is incisive on modern lives, penetrating and thoughtful - and yet always joyfully entertaining and stylishly readable.

Segal’s wit and intelligence are entirely her own and the moral dilemmas of her characters could not be more modern… Segal has a superb eye for the lies that the middle-aged lovers tell themselves, and they are jolted back to reality when it all goes spectacularly wrong. It is nearly a tragedy, but not quite; she’s just too funny

Elegant… an entertaining look at the messy business of trying to be in a family in emotionally trying circumstances… Irresistible

A story that is equal parts hilarious and devastating

Francesa Segal is precise and funny, and The Awkward Age is brimming with keen observations of the highest order--the clever, the sore, and the sublime.

Segal… is a sharp observer of the tribulations of teenage love and modern relationships. Particularly strong on how blind parents are towards their ghastly offspring’s flaws, this book is a lively, quick-witted performance

In Francesca Segal’s magnificent new novel The Awkward Age, romantic and parental love go head to head, stress-testing loyalties and bonds with heartbreaking consequences… Genius… An impressively nuanced and convincing portrait of maternal love… a painful delight to read, invoking a perfectly balanced oscillation between compassion and frustration

Themes of non-nuclear family life, the everyday fractures and renovations inherent to relationships of any kind, amid moments of pitch-perfect comic tension… Segal navigates these re-drawn battle lines with skill and sensitivity… There is no precise time, we are reminded, at which life becomes less tangled, at which personalities are formed as in aspic: we can see that all ages are awkward, but some are more awkward than others

Movingly insightful about love, grief, birth and parenting, funny about teenagers and compassionate about ageing, The Awkward Age is a witty, compelling delight.

AD Miller, author of Snowdrops & The Faithful Couple

An adept, comic study of shifting priorities and the continual flux of child-parent relationships

She takes six characters… and plonks them in sturdy houses in Hampstead, sets the clock, and lets the story play out… Like a good piece of Bach, what unfolds has an inevitability to it but manages also to be surprising at every moment. Segal has an uncanny ability to climb into the mind of each character and show us convincingly exactly what he or she would think, say and do

Francesca Segal’s sharply observed second novel asks what parents owe to their children, and vice versa… A great premise for a novel, and Segal handles it expertly… Everyday family interactions – the deep, primal resentments played out over a bowl of porridge, or a shopping list – are observed warmly and yet with hawk-like precision… skilfully crafted morality tale for our times

Segal excels at character minutiae, switching protagonists from page to page but still doing each one justice… By the end of the book, I felt I would recognise these people waking down Haverstock Hill, albeit that I might not want to stop for a chat… As a comedy of manners though, The Awkward Age is entertaining and intelligently written

Francesca Segal gets the tricky mother/teenage daughter relationship just right in her sharply observant The Awkward Age.

Segal’s writing is a joy – funny, wise, and sharply observant... Terrific

By turns tender, brutal, mordantly funny, and heartbreaking, The Awkward Age is preternaturally knowing about fractured families, and young, middle-aged, and elder love. Every sentence is gorgeously, masterfully written. I loved it as I’ve loved no other recent novel. Francesca Segal is a major novelist

A beguiling story about the oceans between family members, generations, and continents and the journeys we make to reach each other on the other side

Ramona Ausubel, author of Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty and No One is Here Except All of Us

There are moments in Francesca Segal’s novel when you are so caught up in the characters that you want to shout at them as though they are your own friends… Think rows, sulks, unexpected relationships and sweet romance all dissected with an elegantly forensic precision

Terrific, sharply observed… Segal gets the precarious mother-teenage daughter relationship spot on

Segal’s is a clever, cruel, redemptive, psychologically acute novel that made this reader glad to have been at school just too early for Facebook, selfies and an “online community” baying for news of your latest boyfriend

Thoughtful and beautifully observed

A gripping foray into second families

Thanks to its occasional moments of emotional veracity, The Awkward Age will be praised as a worthy successor to Segal’s debut

Francesca Segal is an accomplished writer. She neatly describes the clash of cultures between the academically rigorous education enjoyed by Nathan and Gwen’s freer, no-holds-barred comprehensive school. There is an engaging and colourful cast of characters… Segal vividly conveys the difficulties faced by imperfectly blended families

This is a warm, funny book dealing with a most modern matter

A brilliant, thoroughly modern family drama from the author of The Innocents

Punchy… Segal tackles her subject with humour and intelligence and a wealth of memorable characters

Exuberant and entertaining… The rest of the narrative then considers how the competing needs and duties of its four main characters can be met, handled and resolved. It does so with brio, insight and empathy, and with carefully modulated comic energy

A compelling story on the complexities that come with a very modern family that we just couldn’t put down

Love, loss, new beginnings and saying goodbye, it's all in here. A moving read

[Segal's] descriptions are spare and unerring; everyday family interactions are observed warmly and yet with precision

Francesca Segal is an award-winning writer and journalist. Her first novel, The Innocents, won the 2012 Costa First Novel Award, the 2012 National Jewish Book Award for Fiction, the 2013 Sami Rohr Prize, and a Betty Trask Award. It was also longlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction. She lives in London with her family.

'A very smart, soulful, compelling novel' Nick Hornby 
 
What does it take to be a family? 
 
Julia has fallen deeply, unexpectedly in love. James is her second chance, and everything she never knew she wanted. It’s perfect but for two things: their children. 
 
Julia’s beloved daughter Gwen loathes James and James’s son Nathan takes pleasure in antagonising his new stepsister. Uniting two households is never easy, but the teenagers’ unexpected actions will eventually threaten everyone’s hard-won happiness.

The Innocents

A very modern love story which tells the age-old tale of love, temptation, confusion, commitment, and coming to terms with the choices we've made

Delightful… Segal’s writing is wise, witty and observant.

Wonderful...witty…an astonishingly accomplished debut which will draw comparisons between Segal and Zadie Smith and Monica Ali.

An impressive debut...the struggle to achieve true adulthood, the loss of innocence and the consequences of adapting to a culture that levies certain expectations on its members, are all cleverly worked into a poised text

A subtle, witty and acutely observed study of a narrow but very recognisable world.

Witty and touching... An assured and audacious debut

Compelling... Segal writes with an understated elegance

The central story transcends time, reflecting the omnipresence of love and its conflicting web of duty, confusion, temptation and lust.

The Innocents is an exuberant, sensitive, witty novel, elegantly written, partly a study of universal dramas of love, marriage and fear, partly a very modern, sassy London story, partly a Jewish novel. I found it irresistible

A moving, funny, richly drawn story of a young man's attempts to find out who he wants to be when there are so many others who know best. Full of real pleasures and unexpected wisdom, this book sweeps you along

Written with wisdom and deliciously subtle wit, in the tradition of Jane Austen and Nancy Mitford. Francesca Segal has a remarkable ability to bring characters vividly to life who are at once warm, funny, complex, and utterly recognizable. This is a wonderfully readable novel: elegant, accomplished and romantic

An elegant little novel and a real delight to read... an updated version of the 1920 Pulitzer-prize-winning The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton - the parallels are close, but given how deeply anti-Semitic the New York social elite was in that period, transplanting the story to a Jewish community is not only clever, it also gives a wider, more general point of reference, in quite a subtle way

·A mature love story that meditates on community and ties that bind…a contemporary recasting of that adroit classic, The Age of Innocence…Just like Old New York, this is a community that has its own way of doing things, and The Innocents takes its cue from Wharton’s anthropological musings, doubling as a primer on the importance of the Friday night dinner, the symbolism of the Rosh Hashanah, and the evolution of the Christmakah party…Segal…is a writer of instinctive warmth who can divertingly lavish a full page on a breakfast spread, yet she never loses sight of this haunted truth’

The Innocents has garnered her a next-Zadie-Smith style buzz.

Segal writes with delicacy, accumulating details that create the texture of Adam and Rachel’s world… Adam is well drawn and not unsympathetic, and Segal has skillfully created a cast of secondary characters, including Ziva, a survivor of the Holocaust.

It takes chutzpah to appropriate such a well-loved classic but Segal parallels the two convention-bound worlds with aplomb… [a] classily composed comedy of manners

Hugely enjoyable first novel... The end result falls somewhere between Charlotte Mendelson's When We Were Bad (about a matriarchal Jewish rabbi) and David Nicholl's One Day (with its theme of mismatched love) and is all the more pleasing for that

Elegant little novel and a real delight to read

Francesca Segal was born in London in 1980. Brought up in the UK and America, she studied at St Hugh's College, Oxford, before becoming a journalist and critic. Her work has appeared in Granta, the Guardian, the Financial Times and both American and British Vogue, amongst others. For three years she wrote the Debut Fiction Column in the Observer and she has been a Features Writer at Tatler. The Innocents is her first novel.

WINNER OF THE COSTA FIRST NOVEL AWARD 2012 
 
LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2013 
 
WINNER OF THE BETTY TRASK AWARD 2013 
 
WINNER OF THE SAMI ROHR PRIZE FOR JEWISH LITERATURE 2013 
 
 
 
What if everything you’d ever wanted was no longer enough? 
 
Adam and Rachel are getting married at last. Childhood sweethearts whose lives and families have been intertwined for years; theirs is set to be the wedding of the year. 
 
But then Rachel’s cousin Ellie makes an unexpected return to the family fold. Beautiful, reckless and troubled, Ellie represents everything that Adam has tried all his life to avoid – and everything that is missing from his world. As the long-awaited wedding approaches, Adam is torn between duty and temptation, security and freedom, and must make a choice that will break either one heart, or many. 
 
'Wonderful...witty…an astonishingly accomplished debut which will draw comparisons between Segal and Zadie Smith and Monica Ali' Stylist

Island Calling

*** Preorder the brilliant second novel in the Glorious Tuga series, from Costa Prize-winning author, Francesca Segal *** 
 
PRAISE FOR WELCOME TO GLORIOUS TUGA: 
 
’A much-needed escape, I warmly recommend this beauty’ NIGELLA LAWSON 
‘A magical novel, so uplifting, heartwarming, funny’ MARIAN KEYES 
‘Brilliantly and thoroughly imagined. I didn't want to go home’ NICK HORNBY 
‘Sparkling and sophisticated’ JESSIE BURTON

Francesca Segal is an award-winning writer and journalist. She is the author of two critically acclaimed novels, The Innocents (2012) and The Awkward Age (2017), and a memoir of NICU motherhood, Mother Ship (2019). Her writing has won the 2012 Costa First Novel Award, a Betty Trask Award, and been longlisted for the Women's Prize. 
 
Segal says: 'Writing this novel was a deliberate reaching out for joy. The world can feel very bleak, and bringing Tuga to life became my own magical portal to wide beaches, crystal seas, endless sunshine, and most vitally, to a warm, eccentric community of good people mostly just trying to do their best. Tuga de Oro was a refuge for its first settlers, and I hope will offer refuge for readers, too.'

Francesca Segal

Welcome to Glorious Tuga

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