Kate Evans

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26,301 appearances 191 recordings 3 series first heard Feb 2018 last heard 2d ago

Kate Evans’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 25 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 5.

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The Bookshelf · The Bookshelf’s best: Four standout novels from the past year · 26 Jun 2026 podcast

What's the shape of this family?

Help us imagine where we are and who we're with.

Yes.

So he's a sort of a respectable GP.

They're a middle-class family living in London.

But Cora, the mother, she had been born in Ireland.

She came to London when she was quite young because she had studied ballet.

And so she was a ballet dancer who had actually done something terrible to her feet, which happens to ballet dancers a lot, when she met Gordon and he swept her off her feet.

Lucky that, since they were...

Exactly.

But I think that was quite deliberate of him to model himself as a rescuer.

And so this is the family and then something happens on which all of the action hinges on this day when we should say, and it's significant, isn't it, Seth, that it's raining, right?

At this point, the novel stops being a realist novel, a conventional realist novel set in London with a family, and instead it fragments into three possible futures and three parallel lives that are played out depending on the decision that this woman makes as she goes to register this child's name.

And so we have three sets of characters living three parallel lives, and this whole book jumps forward in seven-year increments.

So from this beginning point in 1987, and it ends in 2022.

We're not going to spoil the whole trajectory, but we will say what happens when this baby is either called Gordon, which is the name that the father wants him to be called because that is the tradition in his family.

Every oldest son is called Gordon.

And then there are two other names.

So Cora likes the name Julian, which according to a book of names, it means sky father.

So she thinks, well, it's still a reference to him.

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