My Sister's Baby

A moving novel about sisterhood, sacrifice, and the families we try to build

Set in small-town Whangārei, New Zealand, My Sister’s Baby follows half-sisters Amy and Breanna as they navigate lives shaped by missed expectations and quiet resentments. Amy, older and always feeling slightly outside her own family, is facing the end of her long, painful IVF journey. With one frozen embryo left and the devastating knowledge that she cannot carry a pregnancy herself, she turns to the person closest to her — her sister — with a request that will change them both.

Breanna’s life, from the outside, looks settled: a demanding career, two children, and a husband who earns well but is rarely home. In reality, she is stretched thin by solo parenting, isolation, and the relentless pressure to hold everything together. When she agrees to carry Amy’s baby, long-buried jealousies and unspoken fears begin to surface, testing the fragile balance between them.

Told in dual perspectives, My Sister’s Baby is an emotionally rich, book club–ready novel about infertility, motherhood, and the complicated bonds between sisters. Susan Edmunds explores what happens when plans unravel — and how love, guilt, and forgiveness can reshape the idea of family itself.

Discover My Sister’s Baby by Susan Edmunds — a tender, thought-provoking novel about finding connection when life refuses to follow the script.

Excerpt from the book

This might seem obvious, but there’s something singularly undignified about having a cold, plastic probe inserted into your vagina so that pulsing images of your insides can be projected on to a screen next to your head.

Every time it happened, it made me think of those expensive thermometers people stick inside a chicken going on the barbecue.

As a glob of lubricating jelly made its presence felt on my inner thigh, I was hit with a flashback of the first time I’d been in this position, lying on the crinkly plastic sheet, staring at the ceiling, crossing every finger and toe in hope.

Back then, my husband, Andy – now ex, for which I was thankful - had given me a wink as the technician readied for the procedure, as if he thought I was going to get some sort of physical enjoyment out of it.

I’d given him the iciest glare I could muster but it sailed past him. All I’d wanted to know was why I wasn’t conceiving. We were having enough sex – even though it had become akin to forcing myself to go to the gym, which I also did on the advice of the fertility gurus. But while it seemed that everyone around me only had to look at their partner and they had an array of children, there was a baby-shaped gap in my life that thumped like a heartbeat.

Now, 18 months and countless procedures later, and one husband fewer, I just wanted the latest scan over with. The wish for a child still rattled in my bones but the process so far had been one crushing disappointment after another.

The image pulsed. I still could never tell what I was looking at when the technician took her snapshots of the moving screen.

It looked like those ultrasound photos you see from people announcing their pregnancies. But it was safe to assume there was no baby anywhere in the murky shapes, just something that might have been a fallopian tube. Or maybe a bit of cervix. Who could tell? They could point out a left phalange and I’d have believed it. I shot a look at the technician, whose name badge said she was Maria. She probably wasn’t even alive when that Friends finale aired.

The baby-making process had been so long, and I had been in this spot so many times, that I was – almost – used to hearing bad news. Still, I bristled at Maria’s thin smile as she started to retrieve the wand. Was it in her contract that she had to smile, whatever happened?

The instrument emerged from my body with a sort of faint vacuum sucking, then an inelegant “pop”.

“I’ll let you get tidied up, then head on through to the consultation room across the hall, the doctor’s waiting for you.”

She pushed a box of tissues my way as if anything less than a shower would get rid of the wash of lubricant rapidly pooling under me. I yanked at the paper sheet that was still lying across my midriff in a flimsy imitation of privacy. “Thanks.”