Nicky Birch

speaker

487 appearances 4 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 31 Aug

Nicky Birch’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.

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Backlisted · Summer Reading 2026 · 28 Jul 2026 podcast

He's an academic and he goes back to Japan for a year and then he goes missing.

So actually what it does is it goes through their life when he goes missing and then it goes above and beyond.

And it ends up being about really about North Koreans, the emigre experience of North Koreans in Japan, ethnic Koreans who lived in Japan.

And then in the war, they a lot of them were either went back to North Korea or

They were sort of repatriated either back to North Korea or in this case, and this is giving a bit of a spoiler away, some of them were kidnapped by North Koreans.

If like me, you weren't aware of this, it unlocks a kind of an area of history, which is really fascinating.

It's all about, you know, North living in North Korea through the.

80s and 90s and what that was like.

And then all the families that kind of, you know, family implications of this and what it's like, obviously, to have a parent, a loss of a parent.

And Louisa's mum, Anne, is quite an unwell.

She has MS and Louisa isn't a particularly, you know, she's quite an angry child and later adult.

having grown up in this kind of difficult situation.

So there's lots of characters in there who are complicated and the history has sort of shaped their individual lives and to not always a kind of beautiful way.

It's about migration.

It's about displacement.

It's about kind of loss.

But it's just it does that thing really well where it has all these different characters, very interesting historical setting, wraps it all up well at the end.

It's kind of globe spanning.

It's just like a really good

You know, it's a really good sort of summer read where you feel well-written, well-written, satisfying.

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