A laborious work of non-fiction.

Reality is often more bizarre than fiction. If four years ago, a satirist had written a novel about the travails of a US right-wing political party and a turbulent election campaign that featured a political ‘marriage of convenience’ between an ersatz war hero and a ditzy moose-hunting governor, critics might have found it over the top.

Thus literary embellishment is applied to the gritty re-telling of 24 real-life stories of childbirth.

Zsuzsi Gartner reviews Great Expectations:

The cover belies the bloody, Gothic comedy of childbirth. An infant sleeps serenely, small spidery fingers curved to cheeks, efficiently wrapped in a cone of white blanket like a little amuse gueule - or a Communion wafer - ready to be plucked up and savoured. But inside Great Expectations there is blood aplenty (and copious other fluids, including tears), thundering pain, death and near-death experiences. The final month of pregnancy is Waiting for Godot, then suddenly the curtain rises on Act IV, Scene III of Macbeth. Editors Dede Crane and Lisa Moore have assembled a hot pot of two dozen Canadian fiction writers and journalists, women and men, to reflect on the childbirth experience from the trenches.

Trench?!? Ha! That’s a new one, I’ve never heard the

va-jay-jay called that.