Michaela Kolowski

She wants her daughter to be married off well.

And the only person really who is an ally to Anna is Yalta, who's her aunt, who was banished and has returned and won't talk about her past.

Anna also has a brother who she calls her brother, who's an adopted brother, who is Judas.

Yes, that Judas.

And he's been Anna's brother and been raised with her.

And he's a radical in the novel and he associates with zealots.

So really the core of the story starts when Anna's parents decide that at age 14 she should be married off.

And when she's taken to the marketplace dressed up in her great finery, she happens upon an 18-year-old Jesus in the marketplace and has this quite electric connection with him.

So the rest of the novel takes place in Galilee where Anna lives.

And also when she marries Jesus, it takes place in Nazareth and we learn a lot about how his family lived.

And there's a lot of very lovely detail in the book.

There's a lot of beautiful research in the book about

that brings that time to life.

So the geography of where the story takes place, the clothing people wore and how it was made and dyed in different colours, the food they ate, the songs, the rituals and customs, even farming practices or what animals people had on a farm, all those things are totally engaging and they do bring

They bring a very strong sense of the world to life.

I think as Kate implied at the beginning in your introduction, there are all these other wonderful books that have taken, you know, Hamnet's a good example, taken a character or a time in history that we know well and either subverted it or shone a new perspective on it.

And I think to some extent...

That was kind of what Sue Monk Kidd wanted to do.

But maybe it's not fair to compare this book to those books because I think at the core of it she wanted to – in Anna she's created a character who – through whom we sort of – we take a look back at this moment in history and we start to see it from the perspective of the people who've been omitted from that history, and that's almost always women.

So she's doing two things in the book.