Praise for THE FOURTH CHILD
“A beautifully observed and thrillingly honest novel about the dark corners of family life and the long, complicated search for understanding and grace.”
— Jenny Offill, author of Dept. of Speculation and Weather
“The Fourth Child is keen and beautiful and heartbreaking—an exploration of private guilt and unexpected obligation, the intimate losses of power embedded in female adolescence, and the fraught moments of glancing divinity that come with shouldering the burden of love.”
— Jia Tolentino, New York Times bestselling author of Trick Mirror
“Jessica Winter's The Fourth Child is a brave, complex novel about a mother and her two daughters—and a morally astute exploration of the rewards, limits, and unexpected costs of faith and compassion.”
— Francine Prose, New York Times bestselling author of Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932
“In this compassionate and riveting novel, Jessica Winter raises some of the hardest questions about motherhood, daughterhood, and personhood. In rich and insightful prose, The Fourth Child explores, with ravishing complexity, the inner lives of girls and women.”
— Helen Phillips, author of The Need
“This book is remarkable enough as an engaging family saga—mapping lives across decades, teasing out the complexities of being a mother, a daughter, a spouse, a sibling, a person. What I can’t quite get over is how deftly Jessica Winter is able to tackle some of our most contentious issues: faith, reproductive rights, power, and sex. The Fourth Child is a balm—a reminder that it is possible for art to provide a nuanced exploration of life itself.”
— Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind and Rich and Pretty
“Winter elegantly delineates the circumstances that create her characters' belief systems, gently lays bare their foibles and convictions, and shows how even the most rigid ideology can chafe against the messy and tender realities of life.”
— Lydia Kiesling, author of The Golden State
“The Fourth Child does something that seems impossible—it probes the Manichean abortion wars through a subtle and arresting family drama. Jessica Winter's portrait of Buffalo during the massive anti-abortion protests of the 1990s is pitch-perfect, and her exploration of the deep sacrifices of motherhood is indelible.”
— Michelle Goldberg, New York Times columnist and author of The Means of Reproduction
THE FOURTH CHILD (Harper, March 9, 2021) is the sophomore novel by New Yorker editor Jessica Winter, following her first book Break in Case of Emergency, which The Guardian called
“an extraordinary debut.” At its heart, the book is a of love story between a mother and her two extremely different daughters—one biological, one adopted—told from each of their perspectives. Largely set in the early nineteen-nineties in western New York State, at a moment when the “Spring of Life” abortion protests and counter protests were consuming areas of the region, THE FOURTH CHILD grapples with themes that are central to American politics and culture today: bodily autonomy, reproductive rights, consent, sexuality, motherhood, gender, power, and religion.
Book-smart, religiously devout, and painfully unsure of herself, Jane falls pregnant in high school; by her early twenties, she is a mother of three in the suburbs of Buffalo, NY. In the fall of 1991, as her children are growing older and more independent, Jane is feeling a spiritual and intellectual restlessness: she becomes involved in the local anti-abortion movement—just as the pro-life group Operation Rescue is setting its sights on her town—and, to her family’s shock, she follows a calling and adopts a child from Eastern Europe, Mirela. But Mirela is difficult. She has never been socialized; has never attached to a loving caregiver. As Jane spends more and more time chasing therapies that might help her new daughter, she strains her relationships with her husband and children, especially her oldest, Lauren.
Feeling estranged from her mother and uncertain of she wants to reinvent herself in her new high school, Lauren begins to discover the power of her own emerging creativity and sexuality—a journey that both echoes and departs from her mother’s own adolescent experiences. But then Lauren is confronted with the limits of her own youth and bodily autonomy, and Jane must attempt to reconcile her principles and faith with her determination to keep her daughters safe.
When she began writing THE FOURTH CHILD in 2015, Winter never could never have known how relevant its themes would be today. She can recall a moment in June of 2016, after the Supreme Court struck down restrictions on abortion care in Texas, when she thought, “by the time I finish writing this book, it won’t just feel like a period piece—it will feel like ancient history.” She couldn’t have known then that Donald Trump—who once said that women should face legal punishment for having abortions—would become president and appoint one-third of the Supreme Court, or that a mob of white supremacists, many of whom have ties to anti-abortion movements, would have invaded the Capitol.
Deftly combining rich literary writing with engaging plot, compelling characters, and incredibly talkable themes, THE FOURTH CHILD is a necessary addition to existing mother-daughter narratives due to its complex, compassionate exploration of abortion, adoption, and the multigenerational experiences of adolescence and womanhood. The result is a work that has been praised by notable writers like Rumaan Alam, Jia Tolentino, Jenny Offill, Francine Prose, Helen Phillips, and others.
THE FOURTH CHILD is a moving novel about motherhood and marriage, adolescence and bodily autonomy, family and love, religion and sexuality, and the delicate balance between the purity of faith and the messy reality of life.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jessica Winter is an editor at The New Yorker. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Bookforum, The Believer, and many other publications. She lives in Flatbush, Brooklyn, with her family.
THE FOURTH CHILD
By Jessica Winter
Harper Books
On sale March 9, 2021
ISBN# 9780062971555