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The Delivery Room, by Sylvia Brownrigg is the most literary novel I’ve read in quite some time, and I’m a bit relieved to find that I still have a taste for them. I can get lazy, lapsing, quite enjoyably and easily into escapist thrillers and paperbacks, and then, when I read something more elevated, if I don’t like it, wonder if it’s really not good or I’m just growing braindead. The Delivery Room is pretty cerebral, and, although I struggled a little with the Serbian politics, I was completely engaged from cover to cover.

It’s a look inside the life of a therapist, Mira, native of Serbia, living outside London, long married to a Brit, during the time of the bombings in the 90s. We see glimpses of Mira’s husband, his adult son and wife, family back home, and even bits and pieces of the patients she is treating. It’s a very rich and complicated weave of lives that intertwine at various levels, intermingled with things English and political.
This passage describes Mira’s lack of ease, even as she ostensibly relaxes and awaits the arrival of a client:

“She sat, mute, and unmoving, for an unmeasured time. Perhaps she slept; perhaps she imagined. Eventually the clock arrived at one of her allotted times and her body, used to its rhythms, tensed and wakened. More stories. Other people. Be ready for new material. Protect yourself, cover over, lose your own griefs in another’s.”

The story is mundane, yet unpredictible and full, the characters believable and likeable, even in their eccentricities. It also speaks, in unexpected ways, about motherhood.

Brownrigg is also the author of Morality Tale, and divides her time between Berkeley and London.

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