Larger than an Orange

Larger than an Orange is a powerful memoir by Lucy Burns that explores the emotional aftermath of an abortion, challenging the cultural silence and polarised public debate around the issue. It is a raw, tender, and urgent book that will never be forgotten.

Format: Hardback
Length: 240 pages
Publication date: 23 September 2021
Publisher: Vintage Publishing

A SUNDAY TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2021

Raw, tender, and urgent, Jessica Andrews' Saltwater Irreducible is a novel that will stay with you long after you've finished reading it. Helen Mort, author of Division Street, praises it as "the story of an abortion."

The book spans the days and hours leading up to the narrator's first visit to the clinic, as well as the weeks and months that follow. The pregnancy was a mistake, and the narrator decides to terminate it immediately. However, there is a vast chasm between politics and personal experience. The polarized public debate and the broader cultural silence fail to prepare the narrator for the physical event or the emotional aftermath.

She finds herself compulsively sharing her abortion experience with others, struggling at work, and researching the procedure. She feels alone in her pain and confusion.

Larger than an Orange is a memoir that blends diary, prose poem, and literary collage. With raw precision and determined honesty, Lucy Burns creates a new space for complexity, ambivalence, and individual experience.

Her writing on choice and its aftermath is boldly innovative, achingly human, and powerfully vulnerable. Dr. Elinor Cleghorn, author of Unwell Women, praises it as "rapturous, engrossing, and beautifully impossible." Holly Pester, author of Comic Timing, describes it as "a triumph of storytelling."

Weight: 306g
Dimension: 215 x 224 x 25 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781784744410