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Mother Country

Mother Country specifications:

  • Paperback
  • 129mm x 198mm
  • 320pp
  • ISBN 9781915635990
  • Readership, general
£10.99
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Shortlisted for the Times Literary Supplement Ackerley Prize 2024

A true story of the passionate and tragi-comic relationship between a mother running from her past in Hitler’s Germany and a daughter running towards it.

Inge was German, half-Jewish and a Holocaust survivor, all of which she chose to deny until the very end. Talented and able, charismatic and infuriating, she surged through life constantly reinventing herself. Sent out of Nazi Germany to the souks of Meknés, she fled a freezing attic in war-torn Brussels to land in a council estate in Birkenhead. London offered the escapee a new start until her past caught up with her. Triumph finally came in France where nobody knew who she was – least of all the friends who adored her.

Led by emotions she could barely understand, let alone control, Inge divided, and often she conquered. After her death, deep secrets emerged.  Her daughters knew that she had always misled others – but not that they, too, might be collateral damage.

Compelling, frank, and witty, this memoir is part detective story, part daughterly fury. Drawn to embrace the identity her mother could not bear, Monique Charlesworth has dug deep into Inge’s story, unveiling tragedy, passion, heartbreak and, finally, the truth.

Reviews for the Highly rated 'Mother Country' 

'In recent years there have been a spate of books about mothers. In spite of the popular Mother’s Day image of them as saints on earth, they are not always what they seem. But few could have been as devious and mysterious as Monique Charlesworth’s. There were so many secrets, so many lies told and so many ways in which Inge reinvented herself right to the end that Monique often despaired of ever finding out the truth. Finally she did, and the result is an affectionate, daughterly memoir that has as many twists and turns as a fast-paced thriller.’ - Liz Hodgkinson, The Lady.

‘But having kept her life under a veil of secrecy Charlesworth knows Inge "would have been appalled and horrified and shocked and absolutely furious about having her cover blown”. She had sleepless nights worrying about this betrayal. Still, she thinks and hopes forgiveness would have eventually come. Her mother, the ultimate performer, might well have been thrilled to be the star of the book. “I like to feel she would have enjoyed it”. - Jennifer Lipman, The Jewish Chronicle.

“Mother Country is Charlesworth’s moving attempt to come to terms with her own dysfunctional childhood: her obedient yet deeply ambivalent relationship with Inge, who was generous and loving yet unempathetic and self-centred; her estrangement not only from her father, whose life ended pathetically in his flat above the newsagent he ran in Tranmere (a suburb of Birkenhead), but also from her sister Lorie with whom she barely communicated for many years - both relationships ran into the ground (intentionally, it seemed) by Inge herself. ‘A book is another way to honour the dead, and with this fine memoir Charlesworth ensures that her family’s past will not be forgotten.” - Natasha Lehrer, the Times Literary Supplement

Data sheet

Author
Monique Charlesworth
Publisher
Whitefox Publishing Ltd

Specific References

ISBN
9781915635990
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