Kate Evans

Now, this is a woman who died in 2016, but we're talking about her book, You Are Not Like Other Mothers, now because it's been translated into English.

Now, in German, it was a bestseller and it was also made into a film for TV.

This is a writer who's written 10 novels.

Her first was published in 1961, as well as two collections of short stories.

Yeah, and her Jewish family history is part of this book that we've both read, Meg Mason.

And it's a bit hard to categorise because it's written as if it's a novel or a fictionalised biography of her mother.

But in a way, it's an elaborate family history.

So we should explain that she's written it almost as if she's in conversation with her mother, whose name was Else.

And there are all sorts of lines from her mother's writing that are quite interesting.

I mean, this woman, Else, who's the main focus of the book, died in 1949.

But she does sometimes look back on her life and says that she was somebody who had to make her own rules.

No one helped me do that.

On the contrary, I was seen as being at best strange and at worst degenerate.

So she also knows she's been judged as a woman and indeed as a mother.

And because this is a woman who was born in the 1890s,

And died in the 1940s in Germany.

It also becomes a story of Germany and the transformations in that country.

So Else was born in a middle class Jewish family that wasn't particularly political.

It wasn't particularly...

particularly engaged with changes in the world.