Showing results by author "Lara Feigel" in All Categories

Custody is the first book for general readers on the history of child custody, an issue that affects so many lives and a question that seems fundamental to our experience and understanding of family. It is also an issue that has played a central, at times troubling role in the history of feminism. Lara Feigel's book probes the relationship between emancipation and care via a range of fascinating (and also heartbreaking, surprising and enraging) custody cases 1800 to the present.

Lara Feigel listens to birds outside her window—their circling, strident calls—and thinks of D. H. Lawrence. It is the spring of 2020 and, as the pandemic takes hold, she locks down in rural Oxfordshire with her partner, her two children, and that most explosive of writers. Proceeding month by month through the year, she sets out to start again with Lawrence: to find vital literary companionship; to use him as a guide to rural living and even, unexpectedly, to child-rearing; to find a way through his writing to excavate the modern world she feels he helped bring into being.

Lara Feigel's first novel, The Group, is a fiercely intelligent, revealing novel about a group of female friends turning 40. Who has children and who doesn't? Whose marriages are working, whose aren't and who has embarked on completely different models of sexuality and relationships? Who has managed to fulfil their promise, whose life has foundered and what do they think about it, either way?