Eleven Hours: A Novel - Pamela Erens

Lore arrives at the hospital alone—no husband, no partner, no friends. Her birth plan is explicit: she wants no fetal monitor, no IV, no epidural. Franckline, a nurse in the maternity ward—herself on the verge of showing—is patient with the young woman. She knows what it's like to worry that something might go wrong, and she understands the distress when it does. She knows as well as anyone the severe challenge of childbirth, what it does to the mind and body.

Eleven Hours is the story of two soon-to-be mothers who, in the midst of a difficult labor, are forced to reckon with their pasts and re-create their futures. Lore must disentangle herself from a love triangle. Franckline must move beyond past traumas to accept the life that's waiting for her. Pamela Erens moves seamlessly between their begrudging partnership and the memories evoked by so intense an experience: for Lore, of the father of her child and her former best friend; for Franckline, of the family in Haiti from which she's exiled. At turns urgent and lyrical, Erens's novel is a visceral portrait of childbirth, and a vivid rendering of the way we approach motherhood—with fear and joy, anguish and awe. 

PRAISE
"Erens [writes] without preaching and without judgment, creating one of the most realistic and harrowing portrayals of birth you are likely to encounter in fiction. She has also written an indelible portrait of two women coming to terms with the desire, fear, crushing losses and fragile joys that have carved their lives, and who know what it means to fight every hour, every minute, to take another breath."
—The New York Times Book Review

"Pamela Erens achieves the extraordinary in her third novel, “Eleven Hours’’: a visceral story about an intensely painful experience that manages to be an intense pleasure to read."
—  Boston Globe

"exhilarating . . . in the heart-in-throat climax, Ms. Erens maintains her poise and precision. The writing is candid without being sensational, detailed without being clinical. This admirable novel reminds us that even when childbirth is overseen by caring professionals in state-of-the-art facilities, it still arrives on waves of blood." 
— The Wall Street Journal

"a novel about the ultimate female adventure . . . fierce and vivid in its depiction of the exhaustion of the spirit and the rending of the flesh during childbirth . . . tough and emotionally authentic." 
— NPR (Fresh Air)

"In fewer than 180 virtuoso pages, Erens knits together two women, two lives, two stories . . .  What passes between Franckline and Lore lifts them above despair, thrusting them toward life itself."
— The Millions

"Pamela Erens has given us a dream that becomes a nightmare and is restored again to dream, a vital, microcosmic, fundamental, riveting, distilled illumination of our most profound and misunderstood passage, the rite at which every reader can marvel: someone once did that for me.  As essential a novel as they come.”
— Elisa Albert, author of After Birth

“Childbirth, this uniquely female form of heroism, is rarely documented in our literature, and I’ve never seen it rendered with the extraordinary insight, urgency, and potency of Eleven Hours. Every dilation and contraction of feeling is recorded, and Erens evokes the layered experience of living in a body—its tides of memory, sensation, and emotion—like no other writer I know.”
— Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia! 

"I loved Eleven Hours. In this gorgeous, haunting, slender novel, Pamela Erens creates an intimacy that is all-encompassing."
—Roxane Gay, author of An Untamed State and Bad Feminist

"With exhilarating speed the wonderful Pamela Erens describes the stories of two women as one gives birth to her first child and the other tries to contain her fears around motherhood. Miraculously, in these few beautiful pages, we learn everything we need to know about these characters and their lives. A brilliantly suspenseful and moving novel."
— Margot Livesey, author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy

"With Eleven Hours, Pamela Erens solidifies her standing as one of the most gifted fiction writers we have. This exploration of a woman's time in labor is at once gritty and graceful, harrowing and compassionate. It is no small challenge to make a subject as old as life itself feel newly observed and newly revelatory, but Erens does exactly that and more. Bravo!"
— Robin Black, author of Life Drawing

"Deeply moving and radiantly written, Eleven Hours is a gorgeous, harrowing, and intensely urgent novel. Pamela Erens is a mesmerizingly smart and powerful writer—I can't stop thinking about this book."
— Molly Antopol, author of The UnAmericans

“Eleven Hours is taut, spare, and gorgeous, a slow beautiful spinning of tension and story that embraces two women whose lives interlock at the moment in which life enters the world: birth. Pamela Erens's prose manages to be both meditative and urgent.” 
— Roxana Robinson, author of Sparta

"Quietly, without the fanfare she is due, Pamela Erens has become one of the finest novelists of the 21st Century, and Eleven Hours is another confirmation."
— Kyle Minor, author of Praying Drunk