Bernadette Brennan
speaker
419 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2018
last heard 29 May
Bernadette Brennan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
But this is a group of people, the Karen, that perhaps most of us don't know a lot about.
And there's a 60-year history where the Karen people aided the Allies and were completely defeated.
thrown over and destroyed, in a sense, by the Allies who didn't really care.
When you say Allies.
The Allies, the British, when the Second World War came about.
It's a complex book, so I'm probably not making sense of it as I start here.
We have a family story of a young girl who is crowned Miss Burma.
Her father, Benny, is a Jewish...
man who was born in Burma, but who lost his parents and has been raised in India.
So he actually has forgotten most of his Burmese.
He also doesn't look like the native-born Burmese.
He comes back to Burma as an adult.
He falls in love with a 19-year-old Karen woman who speaks fluent Burmese, which he doesn't.
He marries her.
They actually have a very passionate relationship, but things go terribly wrong.
And into this, Louisa is their firstborn, into this mixed race, mixed language relationship comes the annihilation largely or the genocide of the Karen people.
And comes the Second World War, comes the Japanese, comes the British and the Americans, comes all sorts of colonial powers that want to use money and power in Burma and don't really care about the Burmans or particularly the Karen.
And so this novel takes you into all of that and teaches you all of that and teaches you that bit of history through characters.
So it's to be applauded for that, I think.
Absolutely.
Showing 341–360 of 419 · page 18 of 21
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