ABOUT
THE BOOK

2020 Longlist

In Jessie Greengrass’s debut novel, our unnamed narrator recounts her progress to motherhood, while remembering the death of her own mother ten years before, and the childhood summers she spent with her psychoanalyst grandmother.

Woven among these personal recollections are significant events in medical history: Wilhelm Röntgen’s discovery of the X-ray; Sigmund Freud’s development of psychoanalysis and the work that he did with his daughter, Anna; and the origins of modern surgery and the anatomy of pregnant bodies.

Sight is a novel about being a parent and a child: what it is like to bring a person in to the world, and what it is to let one go. An incisive exploration of how we see others, and how we might know ourselves.

About the Author

Jessie Greengrass is a British author. An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It won the Edge Hill Short Story Prize and a Somerset Maugham Award. Sight was shortlisted for the 2018 Women’s Prize for Fiction and longlisted for the 2019 Wellcome Book Prize.

Librarian’s Comments

A young woman reflecting on her life and the seen and unseen elements that form meaning and relevancy. We follow her through her life as a child daughter, grand child, a company to her dying mother and awaiting her second child. Lineage and bonds, illusion and understanding, striving for insight are the topics and the reflection on famous scientists help the young mother to accept to be “ourselves with all the losses that entails”. Deep thought, wonderful prose, a great book for (wo)men. Stadtbücherei Frankfurt am Main, Germany