This book is absolutely excellent. I loved every word

I can remember before I had a baby, wondering and wondering what it would feel like to be a mother and have a baby. Maternity Service is a companion for mothers and mothers to be who would like a bit of realistic insight into what it might be like. This lovely book will keep many a new mother company through some of the inevitable long nights of early parenting.

‘Reassuring, funny and wise … A very welcome life raft’

Women need to be prepared for motherhood, in body and in soul, and I hope Emma’s book will inspire mothers to talk about their “maternity service”

This is the book every woman should read before they take maternity leave.
It explains how to navigate this magical but topsy turvy time in a woman’s life -whilst still retaining some sense of self-identity

An absolute jewel of a book. Kind, funny, smart, soothing, and radical. I wish I’d had this book in my early matrescence. Emma writes so beautifully and sensitively from the oft-forgotten inside of the tender, wild months of early motherhood, and gives reassuring and practical suggestions. This book is a hot cup of tea, a steadying hand on an arm, a baton passed with care and compassion. And the correct naming of maternity “leave” as a period of service is so sorely needed; Emma has given us a new framing which rightly acknowledges the work and true nature of care-giving. I inhaled it. A true gift for mothers, and an act of service in itself. This book will change lives.

When Emma turns her forensic gaze onto a subject, that subject should be very afraid. She is stepping out onto virgin soil here and busting it open in the most comprehensive of ways … Attitudes towards Maternity Leave should and will never be the same again. And the first thing that needs to change is its ridiculous name

Maternity leave is a no man’s land. Often literally. Weirdly so little has been written about it – probably because new mothers are too knackered and dazed. Emma has managed to capture this very strange but magical time and make some sense of it for us all

Reading Maternity Leave left me smiling and damp eyed. It was the missives from the frontline that I didn’t know I needed. My kids are grown. I wish it had been around when they were babies. It’s a tender, honest ‘love bomb’ of a read, puncturing the loneliness of motherhood with brilliant lived experience of those early years when you are up at the 3am witching hour figuring out the parts of motherhood no one tells you about. I’m giving it to every new mother (and old) that I know.

Emma Barnett is the David Attenborough of the maternity leave world; her writing is as reassuring as her voice is on the radio. Reading this made me want to weep with relief for the woman I was in those early months – this book should go alongside the breast pads and maternity pants in every hospital bag