"Mother Country travels back and forth in time, and to many places – Nazi Germany, wartime Morocco and Brussels, post-war Birkenhead and present-day Paris – in an attempt to unravel the hidden past of the author’s secretive mother. It 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."

“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.”

“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.”

'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.’

‘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”.

'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.'