Mother is always watching...
From the #1 internationally bestselling author of Recipe for a Perfect Wife comes a chilling horror debut: When a pregnant art conservator's obsession with a mysterious painting spirals into a nightmarish descent, the line between reality and the supernatural shatters, threatening both her sanity and her life.
In a world shaped by climate crisis and population decline, motherhood has become both prized and quietly monitored. For thirty-nine-year-old art conservator Mathilde "Tilly" Crewson, that has meant years spent struggling to conceive, while navigating the growing social pressure surrounding women's bodies and reproduction.
When Tilly is tasked with restoring The Mother, a fire-damaged painting believed to be the final work of a grieving surgeon-turned artist, she becomes consumed by its disturbing history. Soon after, Tilly discovers she's unexpectedly pregnant and it isn't long before the horrors begin: swarms of insects, whispers in the dark, visits from her dead mother, and an increasingly terrifying bond with the painting itself.
As this malevolence intensifies, Tilly fears the forces surrounding The Mother are not only feeding on her, but on the life growing inside her. To save herself and her family, she may have to destroy the painting once and for all.
But The Mother has plans of its own.
Perfect for fans of Nightbitch and The School for Good Mothers, this unsettling novel explores the intersection between motherhood, art, and ambition, and the terror of losing control over one's body and mind. Karma Brown is the author of ten novels, including Mother is Watching, the #1 international bestseller Recipe for a Perfect Wife, What Wild Women Do, Come Away with Me (a Globe & Mail Best Book of 2015), Globe and Mail and Toronto Star bestsellers The Choices We Make and In This Moment, and The Life Lucy Knew. She is also the author of the bestseller The 4% Fix: How One Hour Can Change Your Life. An award-winning journalist, Karma has been published in SELF, Redbook, and Chatelaine, among other outlets. She lives just outside Toronto with her husband, teenage daughter, and a Labradoodle named Fred. "Mother Is Watching is a page-turning nightmare of a novel featuring a maybe-possession as well as a too-possible future technocratic patriarchy. Not since Ira Levin's Rosemary Woodhouse have I been as stressed out and scared for a mother-to-be as I was for Tilly."
- PAUL TREMBLAY, NYT bestselling author of Horror Movie and A Head Full of Ghosts "Set in a birth-obsessed dystopian future, art conservator Tilly begins work on a mysterious painting, The Mother. But as Tilly's work turns to obsession, her grip on reality slips (or does it?). Mother is Watching is eerie, compulsive, almost fanatical, about the fine line between motherhood and grief, and obsession and reality-a gripping, chilling entrance into the horror genre for the brilliant Karma Brown."
- ASHLEY TATE, #1 national bestseller of Twenty-Seven Minutes "The horror in Mother is Watching is not just Frankenstein by way of art conservation-which it is, terrifyingly-but the chilling near-future Karma Brown paints: one in which motherhood is commodified and controlled, and grief is the monster that must not be reanimated. I flew through this novel from the first page to its shattering end."
- KATIE GUTIERREZ, bestselling author of More Than You'll Ever Know "Haunting, visceral, and eerily compelling, Karma Brown has expertly blended genres with Mother is Watching. Horror, dystopian, and feminist literature all fit together perfectly-it's like Margaret Atwood meets psychological thriller, in the best way possible. You'll never look at motherhood the same way again once you read this: Brown prods at it from angles you didn't know were there, making it impossible to look away."
- KRISTEN PERRIN, NYT bestselling author of How To Solve Your Own
