A dazzling collection of hilarious and heart-wrenching stories united by a groundbreaking theme: each is a sidelong glance at the lives of women who – either by choice or by circumstance – will never be mothers and who feel every way it is possible to feel about it.

A dancer discovers she can never have children – a revelation that pales in comparison to the other ways her body has betrayed her. Two elderly sisters who’ve been inseparable throughout life make a momentous decision. A wet nurse at Coney Island’s infamous ‘Incubator Babies’ sideshow is haunted by the ghost of her own stillborn daughter. A young woman worries about the lack of male role models in her little niece’s life…

For the women in Wait Here, who can’t, don’t or won’t have children, childlessness is a hard-won prize, a freedom, a stain, a joy, a battle, a trifle, a conundrum, a wound, an uneasy comfort on a burning planet. It is nothing. It is everything.