Bernadette Brennan

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.

And that's, I think, another power of this novel is

that once you've read the novel, you will go away appreciating that the complexities of Burmese history are much bigger than we thought, but also the complexities of Southeast Asian countries are much bigger than we thought, of who's playing off whom and who's been a puppet.

And there's a line in there where she says something like...

Benny has been writing editorials for American newspapers.

Benny is Louise's Miss Burma's father.

And suddenly he realises they don't care.

They don't care what he says.

And he says, they didn't care at all about the Karen.

They didn't care about the Burmese.

All they cared about were the Russians, the Chinese and the British.

Not entirely successfully.

Okay.