‘My mother lingered on the threshold between my life and my death, inhabiting it with the levity and nonchalance that had always marked her treatment of me.’After going into premature labour, an unnamed protagonist reflects on her troubled relationship with her mother and its role in her traumatic birth experience. Mother takes readers on a journey of motherhood, present and past, weaving gracefully between painful flashbacks, intertextual allusions and heartbreaking descriptions of nurses and doctors fighting to keep the protagonist and her baby alive. All the while the ocean lingers, raising the question: What happened at the beach?