The book is more about the texture of Dora's life than plot, and McKay handles the proceedings with winning, unsentimental care. Period advertisments, journal entries and letters to and from various characters give Dora's voice context. A difficult marriage, many difficult births, a patient's baby thrust on her to raise without warning and other crises (including WWI and the introduction of 'clinical' birthing methods) ensue. Our parents and teachers say it’s a miracle, but it’s not. She is currently at work on her second novel. Ami McKay, quote from The Birth House It’s a disgusting mess we come through to be born, the sticky-wet of blood and afterbirth, mother wailing, child crying the helpless soft spot at the top of its head pulsing, waiting to be kissed. Her first novel, The Birth House, is a Canadian bestseller and was nominated for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. She moved to Scot’s Bay, Nova Scotia, in 2000. After initial reluctance and increasingly intensive training, 17-year-old Dora moves in with Marie on the eve of Dora's marriage to Archer Bigelow, Marie disappears, leaving Dora her practice. McKay sets The Birth House against the historical backdrop of war, influenza, the Halifax Explosion, and the Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919. Ami McKay was born and raised in Indiana. ), who claims to have marked Dora out from birth as her successor. McKay writes in the voice of shipbuilder's daughter, Dora Rare, 'the only daughter in five generations of Rares,' who as a girl befriends the elderly and estranged Marie Babineau, long the local midwife (or traiteur Canadian radiojournalist McKay was unable to ferret out the life story of late midwife Rebecca Steele, who operated a Nova Scotia birthing center out of McKay's Bay of Fundy house in the early 20th century the result of her unsatisfied curiousity is this debut novel.

The Birth House by Ami McKay