Attention! At ease!

An urgent and intimate novel about a mother's love, but also about anxiety and mistakes. The narrator and protagonist of the novel is a mother raising her first child. She is coping with her motherhood with all her strength. Her narrative is a thoughtful and truthful portrayal of the seemingly trivial "struggles for survival" of a woman who is permanently sleep-deprived, often unaware of why her baby is crying and what is troubling him, and who receives little help or understanding from her husband. This novel by an award-winning Irish writer tells the story of early motherhood, capturing the complexities and challenges of this stage of life with extraordinary authenticity. In an intimate monologue, a mother speaks to her son - from his birth to the age of three - and opens up a world filled not only with joy, but especially with weariness, doubt and anxiety. Her narrative is a declaration of a mother's love, completely unconditional, and at the same time it contains a mother's fear of one day having to answer to her adult offspring. The protagonist manages to take care of her offspring only with the exhaustion of her physical and mental strength. It carefully and truthfully shows the seemingly trivial "struggles for survival" of a woman who is permanently sleep-deprived and often has no idea why her baby is crying and what is really bothering him. Moreover, her husband seems to live in a completely different universe, she gets neither help nor understanding from him. The author brilliantly conceptualizes the daily routine with a small child and does not abandon the serious tone in the episodes that could perhaps result in humorous stories, as they more than once threaten tragedy. Kilroy is not afraid to touch on topics that are often taboo. Her urgent novel about maternal love straddles the line between prose and lyrical confession, portraying with deep empathy everyday situations that become a universal experience for many women. "The heroine's confession is motivated by her desire to explain to her son how she felt in the beginning of his life, why harmony did not always reign at home, and to apologize for the fact that the transformation into a mother was so difficult for her. She gets to the bottom of it in the last twenty or so pages, where she partially switches to a poetic style and describes how the child imaginatively "cast her into time": "Before you were born, I never thought about death. Když jsi mi vkročil do života, otevřely se dveře, kterými se dá projít tam i zpátky.“ - Johana Horálková, www.iliteratura.cz „Hlavní drama, které se v Look out! At ease! takes place is the personal growth of the main character. Ta bojuje s neochotou oprostit se od svého starého já, přijde i depresivní propad, který ji málem dožene k zoufalému činu, ale ona ho dokáže překonat a nakonec novou identitu přijímá.“ - Johana Horálková, www.iliteratura.cz Claire Kilroy: Look out! At ease! | Translation by Tereza Marková Vlášková | Read by Jana Stryková | Directed by Kateřina Višinská | Sound and editing by Kate Hamsíková | Mastering by Štěpán Škoch | Music by Markéta Ptáčníková | Filmed in the studio All Senses Production s. r. o. | Graphics adapted from the book cover by Jana Lhotáková | Published by Euromedia Group, a. does - Témbr, May 2026. | Based on the book: Claire Kilroy: Look out! At ease, SOLDIER SAILOR by Claire Kilroy, © Claire Kilroy 2023, Translation © Tereza Marková Vlášková 2025, Published by PROSTOR, publishers, does r. o., 2025.