It is 1998. In the safe haven of her London office--a room her husband
jokingly calls The Delivery Room--therapist Mira Braverman listens to
the stories of her troubled patients, including an aristocratic woman
going through an intense infertility drama, an American journalist who
is eager to have a baby, and an irritable divorcé who likes to taunt
Mira about her Serbian nationality. As the novel unfolds, Mira discovers
she is not as distant from her patients' pain as she might once have
been: her husband Peter struggles with illness, NATO's threats against
her country grow more serious, and submerged truths from her own past
seem likely to erupt.
Compelling, complex, and always deeply human, The Delivery Room is an
engaging examination of the incomplete understandings that course
between therapist and patient, and a set of variations on the theme of
motherhood--as well as a timely meditation on the meanings of wars
fought from a distance, when ordinary citizens have to measure their
personal griefs against the outrages experienced by those under attack.