Kate Evans

Have they stayed that way?

So it's all white.

You'd never be able to find a single book.

But also, I mean, it's one of those stories that has become sort of emblematic of a time and of all sorts of layers of corruption and development, as you say.

What about the personal angle?

What about the people who actually knew her?

Now, Meg Mason, you've also written a memoir on motherhood called Say It Again in a Nice Voice.

What aspects of motherhood did you particularly want to draw attention to or think about in writing that memoir?

Well, look, motherhood, madness and expectations, they all get a good go in the books that you've both read for us.

So why don't we move on to them?

Meg, you read the German novel in translation, You Are Not Like Other Mothers by Angelica Schrobsdorf.

And Michael, you read Bryony Doyle's Echolalia, which is where we'll begin.

Yeah, it was.

So this is a writer who's not easily pigeonholed because her new novel is disturbingly realist, powerfully realist.

It's called Echolalia, and we might leave the title, I reckon, for later in the discussion.

But it's a novel that swirls around a tragedy.

Chapters throughout the book alternate between before and after a central event.

And there's no easy gloss on this one.

The novel opens with a baby who is dead by the side of a lake, really quite tenderly described.

And it doesn't go into details.