The Stork Club - Tapa blanda

"There is remarkable courage in the candour that permeates these pages, as well as a sparkling wit which, despite the poignancy of the story, often made me laugh out loud and somehow contrives to make the book more than the sum of its parts - it becomes a touching testimony of how the human spirit can not just endure, but ultimately triumph over adversity" (Mail on Sunday)

When I was a teenager, I thought you could get pregnant from sitting in a jacuzzi. Not that I'm sure I even knew what a jacuzzi was, but I knew they were racy places where racy things happened. Men, as far as I remember, didn't even have to be there. So long as they'd been in the water in some sort of excitable state, pregnancy was inevitable - even if you kept your pants on. You see pregnancy was that easy, that dangerous and it could ruin your life.

Almost 20 years later and pregnancy could still ruin my life. Although now it is not the threat of what having a baby would do, but of not having a baby at all. I have been trying to get pregnant for two years and have not even come close to hearing the pitter-patter of tiny feet...'

So begins The Stork Club, Imogen Edwards-Jones' very personal, very moving and very funny memoir of her (and her husband's) trials and tribulations with IVF. Poked and prodded by endless doctors, pumped full of an exotic cocktail of drugs and forced to try to have sex at the most inopportune moments, Imogen pulls no punches in her account of this process. In her words, 'The fertility game is like a marathon, where you just have to keep on running. No matter how many times the finishing line is moved, no matter how increasingly heavy the going or unpleasant the terrain, you pick yourself up and, ever more determinedly, keep on going. Until one day, you pray, you might just make it...