Mother Country
Mother Country : a story of love and lies
A true story of the passionate and tragicomic 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 Meknes, 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.
Moth Books published a paperback edition of Mother Country in February, 2024
Reviews
‘Mother Country is, as the subtitle states, ‘A Story of Love and Lies’, in which Charlesworth patiently follows leads and unpicks a hugely complicated family history in order to come to an understanding of her relationship with her mother. Beautifully written and very skilfully structured, the book springs a number of carefully placed surprises on the reader. This is both a compelling detective story and an unusual and highly original book about the repercussions of the Holocaust.’
— TLS Ackerley Prize jury 2024
'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, TLS
‘A riveting and unexpected story of love, loss and wartime secrets. I couldn't put it down. This is a hugely entertaining and poignant story of love, secrets, and the enduring power of the relationship between mothers and daughters. Charlesworth writes with witty self-deprecation and searing honesty about her own emotions, as she makes discovery after discovery about who her mother really was. This is a story which will draw you in and leave you a little wiser about your own family relationships.’
— Camilla Cavendish, journalist and author of Extra Time
'I loved Mother Country. Books rarely feel as necessary as this. A daughter's furious love letter to her half-Jewish mother, wonderfully unpious and unchecked, it simultaneously lays bare a parent's self-protective lies and portrays an extraordinarily admirable twentieth-century survivor - of Hitler's Germany and the Shoah, postwar statelessness, and grey British moral rectitude. Like the best novels, Monique Charlesworth's memoir of Inge reminds us that our world is more riveting, and people's stories always more ambiguous and complicated, than we thought.'
— Julian Evans, author of Semi-Invisible Man: The Life of Norman Lewis
'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 a beautifully and artfully written memoir and there’s a fierce but compassionate intelligence at work which is impossible not to be moved by. It’s full of wonderfully acute, witty, perceptive observations. The memoir is Monique Charlesworth’s attempt to rescue her mother at the expense of betraying her by writing it, a personal journey with elements that are profoundly universal. It’s a fascinating, rigorous and unflinching investigation into the most significant relationships in our lives and how the past shapes our present no matter how we try to deny the aftershocks of history. An astonishing story.’
— Martin Fletcher, editorial consultant