Kate Evans

It's really not a spoiler.

It's more of a structural thing.

And it also has moments that reminded me of the novel The Bass Rock by Evie Wilde, where we meet other women who are unnamed but who have also murdered their children.

So this is a motif that she's interested in and she tells stories that seem almost familiar and she has possibly taken them from real events and we just get these little vignettes.

So that's one of the central things she's concerned with.

Why do women do this?

How do they do this?

What do we understand by this?

I thought it was an extraordinary novel.

I was totally held, even though, you know, you meet that baby on page three and think, can I bear this?

Can I keep turning the pages?

This is so awful.

But as a novel and as a piece of writing, I was totally there.

What about you, Michael?

Well, beautifully developed and beautifully done.

And even that moment, Michael, where you said it's done so sympathetically.

In fact, I got about halfway through and I started to feel uncomfortable with just how sympathetically I was doing this.

I was reacting to this woman, Emma, because I thought, hang on, I have to remember what she's done.

And I wondered if that reading position was actually being unfair to this awful mother-in-law.

And in fact, for the second half of the book, we get a different perspective on her as well.