Kate Evans

Why?

Well, because the third man, so there was Fritz who she ran away with and defied her family.

So he wasn't Jewish.

So she married him and then she was living with him and then another couple lived with them and she had a baby with the man from the other couple.

And then at one of these wild parties, this man, Eric, comes in, who is Prussian, upper class, shocked by everything that he's seeing, but she falls desperately in love with him and has the woman who's written the book.

Well, this is a book that focuses on individual lives and history sort of roars over the top of them.

So in that way, it's quite an interesting way to depict the huge changes that happened in Germany.

But Else and the child Angelica and I think the sister end up in Bulgaria.

So they leave Germany, but Else's mother dies in Theresienstadt.

So it almost becomes another way of telling those stories from the inside of a family out, because even their class positions and wealth, all of that moves up and down over these four or five decades that are part of the story.

And I guess, though, that gets to the other question about this book, Meg, which is how we read it, what it offers to us, because it's a personal history.

It's sort of written like a novel.

I mean, what was it like to read?

Thank you for having me.

Meg Mason is a writer whose books include the novel Sorrow and Bliss and the memoir Say It Again in a Nice Voice.

And Michael Delaney, a journalist and digital producer at the ABC, currently working on the Unraveled True Crime series about Juanita Nielsen.

Thank you so much for speaking to us on the bookshelf.

Now, congratulations on Circus of Wonders, a novel that begins in England in 1866 on a day a trail of caravans comes to town.

Now, whose stories did you want to tell looking inside those caravans?

Well, thinking of power and ownership, Nell's father sold her, literally sold her, to Jasper Jupiter, the ringleader.