You Would Have Missed Me

Written by Birgit Vanderbeke

Narrated by Kristin Atherton

Length

2h 57m

"The voice of Birgit Vanderbeke’s novella, You Would Have Missed Me, is like no other. It is a child’s and not a child’s; it is innocent and knows the world with searing insight; it is funny and it is devastating. It is haunting, disturbing and painful; it is exhilarating, vital and mesmerising. Its narrator is a young girl who has moved from East to West Germany in the 1960s, and whose clear eye and terrible experiences bring into focus the failings, violence and lies of the adult world. What she sees in that world tells us about the power of dreams for human beings – how necessary they are, how they make new things possible, and how destructive they can be. From her Nazi mother to her bitter father, the narrator’s gimlet eye sees how dreams of new worlds and alternative lives can produce horror. But she sees too how the dreams of fictional worlds bring freedom – from lies, from terror, from time itself. ‘If you can read you can perform magic,’ she says, ‘and transport yourself to every country in the world, or change into an animal, or suddenly be in a different era from the one you’re living in.’ Kristin Atherton’s reading has a magic all its own in its weaving together of the child and the adult, of the horror of reality and the hope of escape."