
Ashley Audrain is a Canadian author who previously worked as the publicity director of Penguin Books Canada. She describes her debut novel, “The Push” as a “psychological drama told through the eyes of motherhood.” A January release, it is a tense, page-turning psychological drama about the making and breaking of a family, and a woman whose experience of motherhood is nothing at all what she hoped for, and everything she feared. (amazon, 2021)
In “The Push,” Blythe Connor is determined that she will be the warm, comforting mother to her new baby Violet that she herself never had. But in the thick of motherhood’s exhausting early days, Blythe becomes convinced that something is wrong with her daughter—she does not behave like most children do. Her husband, Fox, says she is imagining things. The more Fox dismisses her fears, the more Blythe begins to question her own sanity, and the more we begin to question what Blythe is telling us about her life as well. Then their son Sam is born—and with him, Blythe has the blissful connection she had always imagined with her child. Even Violet seems to love her little brother. But when life as they know it is changed in an instant, the devastating fall-out forces Blythe to face the truth. Read an excerpt here.

