How to Love Your Daughter: The ‘excellent and unforgettable’ prize-winning novel

A striking and memorable novel. With single-minded intensity, How to Love Your Daughter reckons with parent-child boundaries: the ones that are clear, and the ones that are sometimes hazy, or dangerously nonexistent’ Meg Wolitzer

A woman stands on a dark street, thousands of kilometers from her home in Israel, and peeks through the windows of a home in a city in northern Holland. The two little girls she sees through the window are her granddaughters, whom she has never met, the daughters of her only daughter.

At the center of this brilliant novel is a small family – mother, daughter, and father, in this order, a family whose mistakes, made in the name of love, accumulate gradually to create an unforgettable psychological drama.

With clarity and sharpness, Hila Blum examines the delicate crevices of a mother’s love for her daughter, those that we want to see and those that we would rather deny. Blum draws an intimate road map which exposes the limits of our capacity to direct and to control the fate of our children.

‘When I read this book, I felt . . . that a new and wonderful occurrence has transpired in Israeli literature’ Neri Livne, Haaretz