Naima Coster weaves a beautiful tapestry of voices together in What''s Mine and Yours. This is a sprawling, moving narrative about the messiness of love and family, mothering, race, and community. Here we follow two families connected by place and circumstance as they try to free themselves of those bonds. The result? Rich, complex individual stories that merge to form a satisfying, startling end.>

Autorentext
Naima Coster lives in Brooklyn. She has an MA in English from Fordham University and an MFA from Columbia University. Her work has been published in The New York Times, Guernica and The Sunday Times, among others. She was awarded the Brooklyn Non-Fiction Prize from the Brooklyn Film & Arts Festival for her personal essay "Remembering When Brooklyn Was Mine" in The New York Times. Her debut Halsey Street was a Finalist for the 2018 Kirkus Prize for Fiction and longlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award.

Klappentext

When Val and Milly find out they're both pregnant, the friends decide that they want to be near each other as they raise their children. Val, a journalist, moves to the posh Brooklyn neighbourhood where Milly, an internet-famous travel writer and influencer, lives with her husband, Harris, a restaurateur. The old friends attempt to pick up where they left off a decade ago, when they were best friends and roommates, before a shared tragedy set their lives on divergent paths.

But motherhood hits them each differently. Val is left alone to take care of her newborn daughter as she remembers and retraces her own losses as a daughter. Meanwhile, Milly seems well-suited to new motherhood since she has the help of a supportive young nanny, Cleo, and continues to share online about her beautiful, affluent life, which now includes her baby. As Val begins to fall apart, Milly makes a generous offer: why don't they put the two girls into a nanny share? Cleo can care for them, and Milly won't expect Val to pay more than she can. Val accepts, and she begins to crawl out from under her solitude and unhappiness at being a mother; she forms a friendship with Cleo, a Brooklyn native, and an aspiring musician who depends on her paycheck from Milly.

But as Cleo cares for their daughters, she becomes enmeshed in the unspoken tensions between Milly and Val that are finally rising to the surface as they navigate new identities as mothers. The three women wade through shifting allegiances, delicate power relations, and long-guarded silences as they decide who they will be to one another, and what it is they each desire for the future.