Helen Jukes – författare

*From the author of A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings comes a beautiful and unexpected memoir of motherhood and wildness – ‘ASTONISHING’ (Sunday Times)___ ‘Magnificent, utterly refreshing’ LUCY JONES, author of Matrescence  When Helen Jukes becomes pregnant, the manuals she reaches for feel hollow; the well-meaning advice of friends oddly suffocating. With her body transforming, she’s left with urgent, unanswered questions.  So she looks elsewhere. Beyond humans, and into the overlooked worlds of polar bears, bonobos, burying beetles and a host of other creatures whose ways of mothering look very different to our own.  What she finds is both unsettling and electric: an expansive reimagining of care, instinct and what it might mean to be a mother – animal and human – today___ ‘Joyful and expansive’ Guardian ‘Astounding . . . Read it to feel the slow detonation of mind-blowing understanding.’ Daisy Johnson, author of Sisters ‘Blows societal ideas about parenthood wide open.’ Marchelle Farrell, author of Uprooting ‘Honest and unflinching’ Stylist ‘A book to devour.’ Joanna Wolfarth author of Milk

A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings begins as Helen Jukes is entering her thirties and struggling to settle into her new job and home. Then friends gift her a colony of honeybees—a gift that, according to folklore, brings good luck—and Jukes embarks on the rewarding, perilous journey of becoming a beekeeper.Jukes writes about what it means to "keep" wild creatures and to live alongside beings whose laws of life are so different from our own. She delves into the history of beekeeping, exploring the ancient—and sometimes disturbing—relationship between keeper and bee, human and wild thing. And as her colony grows, the very act of beekeeping seems to open new perspectives, making her world come alive again. A beautifully wrought meditation on uncertainty and hope, feelings of restlessness and home, and how we might better know ourselves, A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings shows us how to be alert to these small creatures flitting among us that are yet so vital a force for the continuation of life.