The Truth About Babies

Babies are wonderfully strange. They enter our lives and things are never the same again. In this lovely and unusual book, Ian Sansom writes about human beings in their first year of life, and the cataclysmic effect they can have on those around them. While most books are either manuals crammed with milestones, or sentimental reflections on parenthood, The Truth About Babies is a book both honest and unique. It is written as a series of alphabetical meditations on every aspect of a baby’s first year, from bottles to baths and waking to walking, and everything in between. Sansom’s own sharp and tender observations are juxtaposed with those of other thinkers and writers: Nabokov on the experience of pushing a pram, D.H. Lawrence on holding a sleeping child, and Ted Hughes on changing diapers, as well as other examples of the wise and the bizarre from the Bible, literature, pop culture and folklore.

The Truth About Babies is playful and profound, philosophical, down-to-earth, and very funny.