'You make deals with God. You make deals with the Devil. You're not fussy. But as a wise man once said: It's the saying you don't care what you get what gets you jiggered. So you say it, and you're jiggered, but what you give birth to is a hedgehog. It's prickly and its cry is a noise so terrible that you wish someone would scrape fingernails on a blackboard to give you some relief.'

In a fairytale, the only good mother is six feet under. All the others are bad news. A fairytale mother will exchange her first-born child for a handful of leafy greens. And if times get tough, she'll walk her babes into the woods and leave them there. But mothers of today do no such things. Do they? In this collection of heartbreakingly honest stories, the mothers of the Brothers Grimm are brought - with wit, subversiveness and lyrical prose - into the here and now.

‘Danielle Wood has turned four well-known fairy tales inside out and upside down, shaking out their secrets in order to illuminate the hidden fears and desires of four very modern women. Psychologically acute and mordantly witty, the stories in 'Mothers Grimm' unsettle the reader with their too-close-to-the-bone truths one moment, and cause a wry smile of recognition the next.’

‘In this wickedly clever, darkly funny collection, Wood cannily captures motherhood as a world of traps and snares: every decision comes with consequences, every priority and choice excludes another. One way to justify choices is to gleefully judge the alternatives. These stories map such jealousies and judgment from various perspectives, revealing vulnerabilities beneath carefully cultivated surfaces — and how circumstances can drive the most committed of us far from our ideals.’