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“Brilliant...So relentlessly quotable...As happens with stunning regularity in this book, Molnar’s sentence gives up riches and terrors. She is describing a transformation that is total, painful and deeply baffling...Molnar pushes this transformation into the stuff of quiet horror. In doing so, she’s written an essential and surprisingly thrilling book about motherhood…A sense of looming violence stains the entire book...An honest rendering.”
―Claire Dederer, The New York Times Book Review (Editor’s Choice)

“Molnar has written a daring and much-needed novel that has some of the hothouse, unflinching quality of Sylvia Plath’s late poetry.”
―The Atlantic

“A postpartum page-turner…[The Nursery] is an engaging experiment in uncomfortable empathy that finds its tonal antecedents in cerebral body horror movies like David Cronenberg’s The Brood and David Lynch’s Eraserhead, and its stylistic sisterhood in the early avant-garde confessionals of French novelist and screen writer Marguerite Duras.“
―The Texas Observer

“The Nursery dares to question the inviolable dictates of a mother’s love when a human is reduced to her suffering—perhaps no love is unconditional after all. What is unconditional, Molnar reminds us, is time. Time is “the main character and culprit” with which the narrator has the most bewildering relationship, but it is time that ultimately saves her.”

―BOMB (Editor's Choice)

“In the “maternal prison of her apartment,” a new mother copes with the dizzying dissatisfaction of postpartum life. One of the joys of reading The Nursery goes beyond recognizing these moments and feelings from my own time with newborns—although seeing that in a book is exciting enough—and includes the sentence-level beauty of the tiniest, private moments between a mother and child. “Has there ever been a description of a mother holding her child for hours? Has anyone unraveled the little hours? My state might be a portrayal of the elasticity of time.” Molnar writes through the delicate balance of life-as-art and comes out the other side with a brilliant novel.”
―Lithub

“[The Nursery] is beautifully written, line-by-line. Its non-chronological structure is deceptively sophisticated, and mimics the sleep-deprived time-fog of the early days. Its metaphors are unexpected and fruitful…Molnar’s writing on the protagonist’s husband, John, is some of the best in the book, starting with his making Button a jazz playlist as his contribution to her homecoming. I laughed out loud.
―Compact Magazine

“Told with radical honesty and emotional precision, The Nursery is an essential addition to the growing canon of literary works reckoning with the complexities of motherhood."
―The Millions

“Molnar offers a harrowing cautionary tale about postpartum depression and the terror it can cause as it strips away any sense of control over mind and body. Some descriptions are so raw and graphic that one almost wants to read them with eyes half-closed. An important, unromanticized look at the instant, drastic changes new motherhood can bring…”
―Library Journal

“Fans of Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder should look forward to The Nursery. It is a searing portrait of postpartum motherhood. Molnar’s visceral writing is to die for.”
―Debutiful

“Molnar’s entrancing debut captures the volatile inner life of a woman with postpartum depression…In one of the most powerful passages, the narrator studies John and finds him completely unchanged while her body has been torn apart, her career put on hold, and her time fully dedicated to raising her daughter…Molnar brings a cutting verisimilitude to her portrayal of the narrator’s fuzzy state of mind, and she’s equally unsparing with her vivid descriptions of childbirth, recovery, and the physical demands of early motherhood. It amounts to a powerful look at what a new mother endures.”
―Publishers Weekly

“A radical novel about the harrowing early days of motherhood, as well as love, ambition, and survival, The Nursery gives precise, gorgeous language to an experience that so often feels indescribable. Szilvia Molnar’s astounding debut powerfully demonstrates that the intricate workings of the female mind and a woman’s bodily metamorphosis and struggles deserve our most reverent attention. I’m obsessed with this book.”  
―Jessamine Chan, author of The School for Good Mothers

“The Nursery is an essential, singular contribution to the literature of mothering as a human, embodied, fundamentally existential experience. Molnar captures precisely how the postpartum time can feel both maddeningly uneventful and paradoxically dire, as a mother’s self continues the transfiguration begun in pregnancy. The novel explores the quicksand of the nothing-time that is postpartum, examining and describing so many mercurial milestones I had forgotten about but immediately recognized…The Nursery presents, with great care, a remedy of artful concision: a revelation of the intrusive thoughts, the ravaging of the body caused by parturition, the torturous effects of sleep deprivation, the chasm that can appear overnight between the new mother and the new father; and, beautifully, the difference between the imagined, potential child, and the real baby. It would be too easy to say this book is about postpartum depression; I caution against any reading that would interpret this story of mothering via diagnosis, as disordered or aberrant, rather than utterly common. The Nursery is more importantly read as a unique and painstakingly observed translation of a brutal, amorphous phase of life, into a necessary and fascinating work of fiction.”
―Merritt Tierce, author of Love Me Back

“With unsparing, hypnotic, and fearless prose, Szilvia Molnar captures the texture, rhythms, and agonies of the post-partum body and mind. I found so much pleasure in the tension between this haunting debut's warm, vibrant intimacy and its clear-eyed, occasionally violent accounting of the body at war with itself. The Nursery is a devastating work of elegance and ambiguity.”
―Patrick Cottrell, author of Sorry to Disrupt the Peace

“I was blown away by this book. Molnar’s precision and phenomenal ear for language gives us new words for the oldest experience-―weaving a fiction that is at once somber and joyful, sly and earnest, nimble and painstaking, perverse and profoundly invigorating. Forget “I feel seen.” I have known some of this narrator’s dark moments myself, yes. But more than seen I felt awed and grateful for this art and talent. A concise, powerful novel on bringing art and life into the world, by a beautiful prose stylist.”
―Lydia Kiesling, author of The Golden State 

“Riveting and precise, The Nursery does extraordinary things amidst the confinement of early motherhood, creating something urgent and incisive. It is a rare book in many ways, not least in its crisp directness and ability to hold the reader’s attention in such a compact, densely woven narrative space.”
―Megan Hunter, author of The Harpy and The End We Start From

“Precisely, scaldingly true. A tense, thrilling debut that explores how a love story can also be a horror story.”
―Clare Pollard, author of Delphi

“The Nursery is a novel about motherhood that dares to put a woman’s body at the center of the story, a book as frightening as it is profound, as gory as it’s beautiful. I was so grateful it found its way into my hands, this reeling vision of postpartum experience unlike any I’d ever read.” 
―Louisa Hall, author of Speak and Trinity

“While reading The Nursery I found myself shocked to encounter things on the page that I had never previously seen depicted in literature: a breast pump, mesh underwear, hulking bloodied pads. Szilvia Molnar writes inside the many blank and hushed-tone spaces of a mothering existence. Miraculously, while The Nursery depicts the reality of early motherhood with acute accuracy, unreal things do happen: time stops, time becomes infinite, moss covers whole apartments, ghosts appear, and ghosts go away―but these unreal events fit perfectly into the otherworldly nature of growing, and then birthing, another body. Szilvia Molnar’s portrait of the postpartum world is ruthlessly true and exacting. It was electrifying to experience the days of early motherhood through Molnar’s razor sharp realism and wit.”
―Rita Bullwinkel, author of Belly Up: Stories 

“Szilvia Molnar’s debut is a fierce psychological novel of one woman trying to reconcile the competing languages of mind and body after giving birth. Like Tim O’Brien and Sheila Heti, The Nursery is powered by the shape of Molnar’s imagination but also the brutal truth of personal experience, proving to us that there is no way to tell a true birth story.” 
―Jessica Anthony, author of Enter the Aardwark