When a new relationship casts her in the unforeseen role of stepmother to her partner’s two children, Helen Mort embarks on a personal quest to understand this most maligned of female archetypes. Alongside her own journey, she revisits stepmothers in fairytale, film and our culture’s darkest corners of fantasy. Turning a bold and inventive gaze on this neglected dimension of maternal experience, these are candid dispatches from the shifting terrain of the modern family. As playful as it is moving, ‘Stepmother’ radiates Mort’s signature empathetic warmth, but with the bite of truth. Mort interleaves ravishing fragments of lyric essay with gothic flights into verse that draw us deep into the woods of upon-a-time, and back, changed, into the now.