Nominated for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2021, Detransition, Baby is a story about three women who are brought together by an unexpected pregnancy and forced to confront their ideas of queerness and motherhood.

Ames, who is mainly referred to using male pronouns, used to live his life as a transgender woman. After detransitioning, he accidentally gets his boss pregnant and asks his ex-girlfriend, a trans woman named Reese who is desperate to become a mother, to help raise the baby.

While the premise is a little contrived (in what world would you agree to share your baby with your partner’s ex?) it’s unusual enough to make the story dramatic and gripping. Peters describes queer issues without preaching to the reader, and you’re bound to learn something about the trans experience that you didn’t previously know. But to describe this as an ‘educational’ novel feels like disservice to how sharp-witted, gracefully written and just straight-up enjoyable it is.