The panic years can hit at any time but they are most commonly triggered somewhere between the ages of twenty-five and forty. During this time, every decision a woman makes - from postcode to partner, friends to family, work to weekends - will be impacted by the urgency of the one decision with a deadline, the one decision that is impossible to take back: whether or not to have a baby. But how to stay sane in such a maddening time? How to understand who you are and what you might want from life? How to know if you're making the right decisions?

After a decade of trying to become a mother - 11 rounds of unsuccessful IVF, multiple miscarriages and a pregnancy which proved almost fatal - Jessica Hepburn knew it was time to do something different. So she decided to swim the 21 miles across the English Channel - no easy feat, especially for someone with an aversion to exercise who couldn't swim very well.

After the death of her three-day-old son, Teddy, in 2016, Elle Wright never expected what came next - that the path to bringing home a living child could be so winding. Elle's loss was followed by three and a half years of endless waiting. She and her husband waited for test results, hospital appointments and so many new procedures to help with their experience of secondary infertility. This wait included friends announcing their happy news whilst Elle was experiencing three rounds of IVF and the loss of three more babies.

Liv's Alone is an honest and hopeful memoir that captures the joy and the challenge that is parenting alone by choice. From smashing the fairy tale story that we're fed from a young age and grieving the life you thought you were going to have, to buying sperm from Denmark and bringing a baby into the world, Liv guides listeners through the highs and lows with warmth, humour and understanding.

When Xanthi Barker's father died when she was in her mid 20s, she could make no sense of her grief for a man who had been absent for most of her life. Her father, poet Sebastian Barker, had left Xanthi, her mother and her brother to pursue writing and a new relationship, when Xanthi was a baby. 

Vanessa's husband, Paul, dies suddenly and tragically on their regular Sunday morning swim. How will she cope with her dilapidated house, her teenage children, the patients who depend on her? Will therapy help? Why do mysterious white feathers start appearing in unexpected places? Beautifully written and honestly relayed, Vanessa uses her professional skills to explore the many questions posed by unanticipated death and to try to find a way forwards. 

This dazzling debut begins with the smallest of life's substances, the microscopic cells subdividing in a petri dish in a fertility treatment centre. She moves through her story in incremental yet ever growing steps, from the fingernail-sized pregnancy test result screen which bears two affirmative lines to the premature arrival of her children who have to wear scale-model oxygen masks in their life-saving incubators. Devastatingly poignant and profoundly observant - and funny against the odds - Claire considers whether it is our smallness that makes our lives so big.

The Willows have been through a lot. Louise has devoted her life to caring for her disabled youngest daughter. Pete works abroad, almost never seeing his loved ones. Their eldest, Eliza, is burdened by all the secrets she's trying to keep from her overloaded family. Meanwhile, Patience observes the world while trapped in her own body. When the Willows are offered the opportunity for Patience to take part in a new gene therapy trial to cure her Rett syndrome, they face an impossible dilemma.

Set against the backdrop of rapidly approaching climate catastrophe, scientists Kate Larkin and Jay Gunesekera are recruited by tech billionaire and mogul Davis Hucken to the forests of Tasmania, Australia. His foundation's mission is not only halting the effects of climate change, but to re-engineer and reverse the damage through the ambitious process of reviving species lost to the earth over time through natural and unnatural means. Including a clandestine ambition to resurrect the Neanderthals.

Sylvia knows that she's running out of time. Very soon, she will exist only in the memories of those who loved her most and the pieces of her life she's left behind. So she begins to write her husband a handbook for when she's gone, somewhere to capture the small moments of ordinary, precious happiness in their married lives. From raising their wild, loving son, to what to give their gentle daughter on her eighteenth birthday - it's everything she should have told him before it was too late. 

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of When Light Is Like Water by Molly McCloskey, read by Katie Beudert. 'There are few things on earth smaller than this country.' Alice, a young American on her travels, arrives in the west of Ireland with no plans and no strong attachments - except to her beloved mother, who raised her on her own. She falls in love with an Irishman, marries him, and settles down in a place whose codes she struggles to crack. And then, in the course of a single hot summer, she embarks on an affair that breaks her marriage and sets her life on a new course.

In a world where women have more choices than ever, society nevertheless continues to exert the stigma and pressures of less enlightened times when it comes to childbirth, defining women by whether they embrace or reject motherhood, and whether they can have children or not. Dr Pragya Agarwal uses her own varied experiences and choices around motherhood to examine the broader societal and scientific factors that drive how we think and talk about this issue - including education, economic status, feminism, race and more.

In the Time of Foxes is both compellingly listenable and deeply insightful about the times in which we live, each narrative a compressed novel. With an exhilarating span of people and places, it shows the short-story collection at its most entertaining and rewarding and introduces Jo Lennan as an irresistible new storyteller. 

Having been told by doctors that due to Izzy's polycystic ovarian syndrome they would have difficulty conceiving - and after two years of trying - Izzy and Harry turned to IVF. Izzy's aim drawing on her own experience is to break through some of the taboos surrounding miscarriage, IVF and fertility issues. This brutally honest and deeply personal account will acknowledge the struggles that so many couples go through but will ultimately focus on the positive life-changing and remarkable results that IVF can yield.

Six months after the birth of her son, Emma Jane Unsworth finds herself in the eye of a storm. Nothing - from pregnancy to birth and beyond - has gone as she expected. A birth plan? It might as well have been a rough draft! Furious and exhausted, her life is the complete opposite of what it used to be. She's swapped all night benders for a grazed labia and Whac-a-Moling haemorrhoids. How did she end up here? In this brave and hilarious account of postnatal depression, Emma tells her story of despair and recovery.