The cover of Gunk displays a perfect fried egg: crispy, runny, glistening with oil. It’s a suitable emblem for a novel about making babies and motherhood. Provocatively flaunting its own goo, the egg gives some of the flavour of Saba Sams’s debut novel and her unabashed writing about bodily functions.

Gunk begins with the narrator, Jules, feeding colostrum to a newborn. Despite the intimacy of the process described – her ‘skin slides against the baby’s’ – it emerges that Jules is not the baby’s mother. His birth mother, Nim, has vanished, leaving him in Jules’s care. Jules then describes the events that preceded this mysterious development, giving Gunk a neat teleological structure. 

Jules is someone who has always wanted a baby. As a child, she played the part of a ‘kind matron of an orphanage’; later, when married, a longing for pregnancy meant that the arrival of her period hit her ‘like a brick in the chest’. She first encounters Leon