I’ve just closed this deeply intimate book about childbirth, and I wasn’t expecting such a vivid, almost physical emotion. It’s a powerful text, sometimes brutal, but never indulgent in pathos—always carried by immense sensitivity. To anyone expecting a simple testimony, think again: this is a true literary experience, with striking, deeply moving prose. Proof that one can tell an intimate story while preserving a novelistic breath.—@Lecturesauhasard (87k followers)

I read it in one sitting. Diane recounts, in her pure and elegant style, the rushed birth of her child. She speaks of naïveté and optimism, uses humor, and is frank and lively.—@JuliaKerninon

They say that people who aren’t afraid have no imagination… One is not born a mother; one becomes one.—@AnnePlantagenet

Her precise, almost surgical writing unfolds each moment with the rigor of a countdown, creating a dramatic tension worthy of a thriller. A book written as if to catch one’s breath again, expressing—behind the relief of a happy ending—the shock of being recalled, in the midst of a dream of happiness, to our human condition.—@Leslecturesdecannetille

Diane Brasseur knows how to share her emotions, her apprehensions, her anguish upon hearing certain medical verdicts, with words that are both simple and powerful, without pathos, and always with a certain modesty when speaking about bodies. It’s a novel about the intimacy of a woman becoming a mother, of a lover becoming a father. It’s beautiful, powerful, and comforting—like a maternal hug.—@Babeth_ladreyt

A text of rare intensity, both raw and profoundly human.—Le Dauphiné & Vaucluse Matin (11/01)

Unmissable—an intense and authentic account. A luminous text on the fragility of the body, and a true tribute to public hospital staff.—L’Éclaireur 

A powerful novel.—Santé Magazine, February issue

The sentences are short, bare, as if they came straight from the body.—WeCulte – Books not to miss (01/12)

“A few days before my premature delivery, when I hadn’t told my father about my stomach pains, he sent me a postcard with an angel painted in red, funny and disturbing like a child’s scribble.

Guardian Angel, that was the title written on the back, next to these sweet words: “This little angel is here to say hello to the little fellow on his way.”

It was a month and a half before my due date, as confirmed by the postmark.

What strange premonition had struck my father?”

For her fourth novel, Diane Brasseur returns to the intimate vein of her debut novel Loyalties. With writing that is both clinical and deeply novelistic, she recounts an event as ordinary as it is extraordinary: childbirth.