The Nursery

Publishing March 2023 with Pantheon Books

A debut novel from a remarkable new talent: a visceral and revelatory portrait of a woman struggling with maternal fear and its looming madness, showing how difficult and fragile those postpartum days can be, and how vital love is to pull anyone out from the dark

There is the before and the after. Withering in the maternal prison of her apartment, a new mother finds herself spiraling into a state of complete disaffection. As a translator, she is usually happy to spend her days as the invisible interpreter. But now home alone with her newborn, she is ill at ease with this state of perpetual giving, carrying, feeding. The instinct to keep her baby safe conflicts with the intrusive thoughts of causing the baby harm, and she struggles to reclaim her identity just as it seems to dissolve from underneath her.

Feeling isolated from her supportive but ineffectual husband, she strikes up a tentative friendship with her ailing upstairs neighbour, Peter, who hushes the baby with his oxygen tank in tow. But they are both running out of time; something is soon to crack. Joyful early days of her pregnancy mingle with the anxious arrival of the baby, and culminate in a painful confrontation – mostly, between our narrator and herself. Striking and emotive, The Nursery documents the slow process of staggering back towards the simple pleasures of life and reentering the world after post-partum depression.

“A powerful and haunting novel about post-partum fog and depression.”
―Claire Benedict, Bear Pond Books in Montpelier, VT

“This may be the most powerful and provocative novel of the year. The narrator describes her battle with postpartum depression, something only experienced by a select group and one that is impossible to imagine for any others. But the depths the mother reaches into cannot fail to stir the thoughts and emotions of any reader and certainly lead to empathy for any person suffering through similar anxiety, pain and fear. A distinctive novel on a crucial subject, it should be required reading for any administrator or legislator who does not believe extended maternity leave is not beneficial and essential for the well being of all of society.”
―Bill Cusumano, Square Books in Oxford, MS

“The Nursery is a hypnotic book. The writing excellently focuses on the moment-to-moment nature of new motherhood and postpartum depression. With the main character’s quick flashbacks and sporadic google searches sprinkled throughout the narrative, Molnar had me living in the seconds/minutes between the characters’ waking, sleeping, and conversing. It’s tense at times, exhausting at other times, but it’s ultimately absorbing in a great way.”
―Stuart McCommon, Novel Books in Memphis, TN

“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

“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, award-winning 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

“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, Whiting award-winning 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

“Szilvia Molnar’s gripping debut pulls the reader into the surreal, utterly strange, and deeply moving world of new motherhood. Molnar pushes past the limits of ordinary language and traditional narrative structure to reveal the most hidden, vulnerable, and self-altering moments that happen to a person just after giving birth. Inside this slim volume, delicacy and tenderness rub shoulders with a kind of horrifying, animal unease and every page is drenched in equal parts anguish and charm. For fans of Julia Fine’s The Upstairs House and Louise Bourgeois’s Maman.
―Kyra Wilder, author of Little Bandaged Days

British Commonwealth rights sold to Oneworld, to be published March 21, 2023

Brazilian rights sold to Todavia, tentative publication Fall 2023/Spring 2024

French rights sold to Actes Sud, tentative publication Fall 2023/Spring 2024

German rights sold to Aufbau Verlag, to be published April 18, 2023

Hungarian rights sold to Open Books, tentative publication Fall 2023