There are guides to every aspect and every angle of parenthood-from prenatal to post-college-yet none tells us what couples really and truly feel once confronted with the awesome power of Nature's Course. The Three of Us does.

Seasoned travelers, successful professionals, Joanna Coles and Peter Godwin arrived in Manhattan ready to make it their oyster-she to be the New York correspondent for a major British newspaper, he to pursue his prize-winning career as a writer and journalist. Of course they were self-absorbed; why come to New York, if not to explore every avenue of self-interest? The news that Joanna is pregnant, however, causes a massive shift in paradigm. Suddenly they are launched unsteadily but irrevocably toward an altogether new New World.

Like a series of mental ultrasounds, The Three of Us consists of alternating diary entries in which, day by day and month by month, Peter and Joanna navigate the uncharted waters of impending parenthood. There is much to discuss-the pros and cons of raising a child in a neighborhood frequented by transvestite prostitutes, for example-yet their reactions are not always on the same page; male and female panic about the Joyous Event, as we learn, can differ sharply. But every parent-to-be, every parent-that-is, will recognize and rejoice in the wonderful, terrible, and sometimes hilarious anxieties that attend the building of a nest. The Three of Us is a candid, refreshing, and reaffirming memoir about coming to terms with a new life.

Joanna Coles is the New York correspondent for the London Times. This is her first book. Peter Godwin is the author of Mukiwa, A White Boy in Africa, which won the George Orwell Prize, and writes forNewsweek, National Geographic, and the New York Times Magazine. They live in New York with their son, Thomas.