Welcome to motherhood - a land of aching fatigue, constant self-sacrifice and thankless servitude, a land of bottomless devotion, small hands and feet like warm pink roses, and velvet kisses. Here is a land where men and women, once carefree and engrossed in work and sex, now try to solve age-old arguments and search fruitlessly for another hour in the day. Perhaps you know this land well, or perhaps you're entering it for the first time - either way, you need these honest, sharply funny, humane stories from an expert guide. Selected from Helen Simpson's short story collections Dear George, Hey Yeah Right, Get a Life, and Constitutional. VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS. A series of short books by the world's greatest writers on the experiences that make us human. Also in the Vintage Minis series: Language by Xiaolu Guo; Fatherhood by Karl Ove; Knausgaard Eating by Nigella Lawson; and, Drinking by John Cheever.

Helen Simpson's sixth short-story collection, Cockfosters, follows Four Bare Legs in a Bed (1990), Dear George (1995), Hey Yeah Right Get a Life (2000), Constitutional (2005) and In-Flight Entertainment (2010). A Bunch of Fives: Selected Stories (2012) includes five stories from each of her first five collections. She has received the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, the Hawthornden Prize and the E.M.Forster Award. She lives in London.