Bernadette Brennan

Can you give us a sense of the time period we're talking about?

Because it is pretty complicated.

It is pretty complicated.

The novel moves from, I think, basically 1920s up until the late 1960s, I think it is.

It's a big novel.

I can turn the pages and see this here.

Yeah, till 65 it goes through, 1926 to 1965.

These days we know quite a bit, well, we think we know quite a bit about what are now called the Rohingya people in Myanmar.

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.