The Blue Jay's Dance, by Louise Erdrich (Flamingo, £5.99)

Personalised books about childbirth, babies and children can make for difficult reading. Novelist Louise Erdrich's account of the first year of her third baby's life is gentle, unsentimental, honest and very moving. During that year the couple, who have three natural daughters as well as three older, adopted children, saw the older ones "hit adolescence like runaway trucks". Her random, conversational yet meditative account is that of a person going through a rare experience for the third time and so is alert, not surprised. The baby's presence serves to heighten Erdrich's perceptions of nature's seasonal routines. Author of lush, lively fictional narratives such as Love Medicine and The Beet Queen, Erdrich, of German American and Chippewa descent, has a rich store of cultural references to draw on and often uses language with a mythic abandon. A warm, lyric, loving, haphazard diary of observations and reflections, The Blue Jay's Dance acutely articulates those joys, fears and emotions unique to parents.