Postpartum depression affects millions of new mothers every year. This is an epic poem to women everywhere.

Black Milk is the affecting and beautifully written memoir on motherhood and writing by Turkey's bestselling female writer Elif Shafak, author of Honour, The Gaze and The Bastard of Istanbul which was long-listed for the Orange prize.

Postpartum depression affects millions of new mothers every year, and- like most of its victims- Elif Shafak never expected to be one of them.

But after the birth of her first child in 2006, the internationally bestselling Turkish author remembers how "for the first time my adult life . . . words wouldn't speak to me".

As her despair finally eased, Shafak sought to resuscitate her writing life by chronicling her own experiences.

In her intimate memoir, she reveals how she struggled to overcome her depression and how literature provided the salvation she so desperately needed.

'An intimate, affecting memoir . . . Her passion for literature is contagious, and her struggle with postpartum depression and writer's block reinforces how carefully all of us must tread. Beautifully rendered, Shafak's Black Milk is an epic poem to women everywhere' Colleen Mondor