Terrific Mother

Faber Stories, a landmark series of individual volumes, presents masters of the short story form at work in a range of genres and styles. Adrienne is living in a puritanical age, when the best compliment a childless woman can get is: 'You'd make a terrific mother'. That's when she goes to her friends' Labor Day picnic and accidentally kills their baby. The shock of this scene is expertly packed into two brief paragraphs. What follows is Adrienne's retreat from life and her attempt to return to it. Her sharp scepticism about the people around her is achingly funny. Yet beyond derision there is forgiveness and something along the lines of love.

Lorrie Moore is the award-winning author of five story collections, four novels, a collection of criticism and a children's book. A Gate at the Stairs was shortlisted for the 2010 Orange Prize, now the Women's Prize, and she has received numerous accolades from the Lannan Foundation, the National Books Critics Circle, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. After serving for almost three decades as the Delmore Schwartz Professor in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Moore is now the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University.