Unexpected
About this audiobook
A funny, addictive and poignant novel about what happens when the lines between friendship, romance, and family begin to blur.
Robin and Kessie have been best friends since childhood when their families fractured. Now, in their mid-thirties, they are keen to have children themselves, but each faces daunting obstacles. In stepping up to support each other, they begin to negotiate unconventional routes towards motherhood, challenging assumptions about ‘normal’ family relationships along the way.
Delving into anthropology, animal behaviour, family law, and artists and thinkers from Zora Neale Hurston to Joni Mitchell, this novel offers a fresh contribution to contemporary writing on female friendship, motherhood, and queering the nuclear family.
About the author
Ellen Wiles grew up in Reading and did a music degree at Oxford before turning to human rights and working as a lawyer in Thailand, Botswana, Myanmar and London. Her debut novel, The Invisible Crowd, was inspired by a case she worked on as a barrister, and was a Guardian Readers’ book of the year and winner of the Victor Turner Prize for ethnographic writing. She is also the author of Saffron Shadows (2015), a book about literature, censorship and culture in Myanmar. She is a lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Exeter, and is the mother of two small children.
