Childbirth and early parenthood are common and utterly life-changing experiences. They are rich in narrative opportunities, offering a journey full of conflict, joy, struggle and pain, both physical and emotional. Yet they are rarely the subject of fiction. Female characters have babies, yes, but that is so often the end of their story: it's much neater and more pleasingly metaphorical to end a novel with a pregnancy.

When I was in the throes of pregnancy and early motherhood, I felt really angry about – well, everything, really – but particularly about the fact that, for the first time in my life, fiction seemed to have let me down. When I was a lonely child, a poetic teen, a confused young woman, there seemed no end of fictional representations of my plight. Where were the heroines going through what I was experiencing now? Pregnancy and childbirth were often reduced to an ellipsis, a gap between sections or even paragraphs. There were plenty of non-fiction books ready to tell me how it should be. But where were the novels that could tell me how it actually was?

And so, predictably, I set about writing my own novel on these themes, fuelled by every writer's desire: to write the novel that you really want to read, the one that you need to read. While doing so, I thought often of these few notable exceptions to fiction's natal taboo.

Moss's book is basically a whole novel about the torture of sleepless nights and gruelling days spent in pursuit of five minutes alone with one's work. But it's much, much more fun than that sounds. Our heroine, Anna Bennett, tells a funny, moving and bracingly honest tale of her own early motherhood, with her enchantingly-named toddler, Moth, pushing her to extremes on a remote Hebridean island while her rather useless husband escapes to research puffins. The messy awfulness of being (almost) sole carer for two under-fives while trying to write a book is sharply and entertainingly described. I consumed it in greedy, golden snatches while my own toddler slept.

It comes at the end of the novel, but Barry's description of Roseanne McNulty giving birth during a storm among the boulders of Coney Island, County Sligo, is fulsome, visceral and poetic in exactly the right way. I'm always impressed when male writers have the balls to take on this very female territory of blood and pain. Which leads me to …

The description of Jay's labour in Common Ground is 18 pages long. Perhaps, for some women, that isn't nearly long enough (a trilogy of novels might just cover some of the pain we go through), but, in a novel written by a man – actually, in any novel at all – it's pretty remarkable. Like all of Cowan's writing, it's detailed, careful and astonishingly alive. It's also absolutely nail-biting. It's worth noting here that Cowan is something of a pioneer in writing detailed, domestic novels of early fatherhood. Take a look at his masterpiece, Crustaceans, which is an utterly heartbreaking, beautifully restrained novel about the loss of a child.

Privileged, clever, pedantic Rosamund Stacey's life is transformed when she falls pregnant from a one-night stand and has to grapple with the realities of becoming a single mother in 1960s London. Interestingly, Rosamund is largely free of the guilt-ridden anxieties of today's working mothers, blithely employing a lady – while she cracks on with her soaring academic career – to come round and mind the baby now and then. The novel's most affecting scene comes when Rosamund's decorum breaks down completely as she screams the hospital waiting room down in order to be granted access to her sick baby.

O'Farrell weaves together two stories of new motherhood. Lexie Sinclair becomes a mother almost despite herself, and manages to do so while forging a career as a journalist in late 1950s London. Elina, a contemporary artist, struggles to cope after a traumatic caesarean. The novel is worth reading purely for the scene in which Elina is locked in her in-laws' bathroom, trying to clean baby poo from herself, her newborn, and the walls. The only scene that didn't convince me was the one where Lexie and Robert have sex in a B&B room they're sharing with her two-year-old. Their method for securing some privacy? Turn the boy, sleeping in his buggy, to face the wall. Maybe I'm a being a bit matronly here, but – really? Really?

A typically singular and uncompromising vision from Myerson, Me and the Fat Man is written entirely from the close-up, skewed point of view of its heroine, Amy, who is motherless, unhappily married, and gets paid to give blow-jobs in her local park. Then she meets Gary, the fat man, and has his child. Perhaps the most remarkable, uncomfortable and taboo-busting scene in the book is the one where Amy breastfeeds her child while Gary gropes Amy. All bodily functions are unflinchingly described in this novel, and Amy's love for her boy is fierce and visceral and full of pain as well as joy. "Without looking, his black eyes can find you in a room," she says. Indeed.

A nightmarish vision of biological determinism, as practised by a speculative vision of a totalitarian former-USA. The Handmaid's Tale reminds us of the terrors of defining women solely by their reproductive abilities. Under Gilead's regime, our heroine Offred has no choice but to breed, and is allowed to do little else. But the lyrical flashbacks to her past also serve to offer a vision of the joys of motherhood and family life. Thus Atwood gives us the two sides of motherhood, magnified and distorted to compelling, vivid, terrifying effect.

In The Handmaid's Tale, Atwood famously decided not to include any atrocity or cruelty that hadn't already occurred at the hands of some regime. Morrison recreates many of the brutal realities which inspired Atwood's speculation. Beloved is one of the most astonishing and important novels in the English language, and is deeply wise and eloquent on childbirth and motherhood. Morrison fearlessly depicts the consequences of slavery's denial of any family life for its black "property". Sethe, the main character, is not allowed to be a mother to her child, has her breast milk stolen – literally sucked from her — by two white boys, and commits the ultimate act of protection in this horrifically-skewed society. Despite the ugliness of the world it represents, this is an astonishingly beautiful novel.

I read this whilst pregnant and was delighted to find, hidden in the most famous European novel about adultery, illicit passion and moral codes (and almost everything else besides), Dolly's thoughts about the bleak drudgery of pregnancy and childbirth. Of all the sentences I'd expected to find in a novel by Tolstoy, this was not one of them: "Darya Alexandrovna shuddered at the mere recollection of the pain from cracked nipples that she had endured with almost every child." Tolstoy understood.

Shriver's novel is the most sensational book on my list, perhaps, but it's also blackly hilarious and ultimately moving. We follow Eva, bright, brittle, lost, as she relates her journey from successful businesswoman to vilified mother-of-a-monster via a series of chillingly realistic (and recognisable) parenting "challenges" with her son. Some women were incensed that Shriver, not a mother herself, could write such a novel. Personally I think this is one of the bravest and most honest books about parenting that I have encountered.