What happens when an English teacher goes into labor during a high school lockdown?
High school English teacher Elise loves teaching Shakespeare. She is also very pregnant and trapped in a classroom with her Grade 12 students during a lockdown. Anthony, the cause of the lockdown, is roaming the halls with a knife in search of some solace, consumed by thoughts of his best friend Samantha's suicide attempt. Maria, the school's counsellor, is second-guessing her decision to turn him in.
As the lockdown drags on, Elise can no longer deny that she's going into labour. And she'll have to rely on the students to get her through: Shai-Anna and Faduma end up acting as midwives, and the others do what they can.
This isn't your typical lockdown story. With clear-eyed empathy, Born explores the many pitfalls and utopian possibilities of the school system, motherhood, and caregiving, and the sometimes fraught, sometimes transcendent nature of the student-teacher relationship.
Praise for the author:
Included in the Quill & Quire 2025 Spring Preview
"Birrell is not interested in crafting a suspense tale. Instead, she has written a narrative about the difficulties inherent in operating a diverse, multicultural educational institution and what happens when the carefully constructed boundaries between authority figures and students rupture." – Steve Beattie, That Shakespearean Rag
"One of the best books you'll read in 2025, Heather Birrell's new book has everything. Gorgeous, compelling, fraught with tension, chasing shadows, full of light. Dazzlingly literary and unputdownable at once, this story of a high school English teacher who goes into labour during a lockdown is a polyphonic ode to caregiving, community, and public schools. It's a fast paced read that will stay with you long after the final pages (which made me cry, it was so beautiful)." – Kerry Clare, author of Asking for a Friend
"In her new collection, Mad Hope, Birrell puts her talents on display once more, exploring characters whose reasonable expectations of the world have been devastated by sudden death (sometimes violent) or other tragedies…Some of her characterizations are so arresting in their exactness they caused me to pause." – The Globe and Mail
"[Birrell] seems to have mastered the art of writing about universal themes and subjects – marriage, family, motherhood, death, sex – in a manner both familiar and unsettling. Her prose is dense with detail yet fluid, carrying the reader into the inner workings of her characters' carefully constructed lives." – Quill & Quire
