Mother Tongue, a new memoir from Writing alum Sara Nović '14, is set to hit shelves on May 5, 2026. The book, which being published by Penguin Random House, tracks Nović’s path out of the hearing world and into the deaf community—and seeks to understand what it means to raise children who straddle both worlds.
Praise for the work has already begun to circulate. The author of Yellow Bird, Sierra Crane Murdoch, complimented Nović’s ability to “skillfully [subvert] the dividing lines of identity, her deafness becoming the thread that connects us all.” Andrew Leland, author of The Country of the Blind, called it “funny, intimate, honest, and deeply moving. At the same time, it’s full of rich historical detail, dazzling critical inquiry, and political fury.”
Nović took to her Instagram to share her enthusiasm about the upcoming work. “Despite—and a little because of—everything, I wrote this book, which I'm excited (and nervous!) to share with you this spring.” She delved into the multi-hyphenate balance of the work. “It’s a little bit memoir, a little bit cultural criticism, a little bit history. It’s about deafness, queerness, adoption, parenthood, religion, systemic oppression and white supremacy and sexism, disability, chronic illness and eugenics. It’s about the current state of our world, and joy in the face of all of it, how we build new selves and lives together between the cracks.”
As Nović worked on the project, she watched it grow before her eyes. “Mother Tongue started out as letters to my kids—and because of that the project was initially much more contained and narrower in scope. But the more I wrote, the more I realized that one's identity can't be parceled out into discrete sections so neatly, that all our selves not only inform one another but create something new, too. To me, that kind of learning through the process of writing is what makes writing worth doing, even when it's hard.”
Nović is the author of the New York Times bestseller True Biz and Girl at War, which won the American Library Association’s Alex Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She holds an MFA from Columbia University, where she studied fiction and literary translation, and is an instructor of Deaf studies and creative writing. She lives in Philadelphia with her family.
