How to Love Your Daughter

What damage do we do in the blindness of love?

Thousands of miles from her home, a woman stands on a dark street, peeking through well-lit windows at two little girls. They are the daughters of her only daughter, the grandchildren she's never met.

At the centre of this mesmerising story is the woman's quest to understand how a relationship that began in bliss – a mother besotted with her only child – arrived at a point of such unfathomable distance. Weaving back and forth in time, she unravels memories and long-buried feelings, retracing the infinite acts of parental care, each so mundane and apparently benign, that together may have undermined what she most treasured.

With exquisite psychological precision, Blum traces the seemingly insignificant missteps and deceptions of family life, where it's possible to cross the line between protectiveness and possession without even seeing it – and it's uncertain whether, or how, we can find our way back.

About the Author

A native of Jerusalem, Hila Blum has also lived in Hawaii, Paris and New York. Originally a journalist, for the past 14 years she has worked as an editor at Kinneret Zmora-Bitan, one of Israel's leading publishing houses. Her first novel, The Visit, was shortlisted for the 2012 Sapir Prize. How to Love Your Daughter, her second novel, won the same prize in 2022.

Reviews

"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 non-existent" —Meg Wolitzer

"Hila Blum explores one particular mother-daughter relationship with remarkable acuity. Her novel takes us on a suspenseful psychological journey as she plumbs a great mystery: how the purest maternal love can lead to the most unwanted and even disastrous consequences" —Sigrid Nunez

"This mesmerizing, quietly harrowing novel begins with a mother's complete estrangement from her adult daughter and works backward to reveal the ways that maternal love can strangle when it was only trying to cradle, can recklessly misdirect when it wanted to protect. Excellent and unforgettable" —Ann Packer, author of The Children's Crusade and The Dive from Clauden's Pier

Dimensions: 12.9 x 1.45 x 19.81 cm