I can’t, and I can, all at the same time,” says Bracht. “They had to keep going, they had no choice. What does it take to endure that kind of slavery and want to live? Who was that person? I knew it was the haenyeo Despite the atrocities each is forced to suffer in the other’s absence during the war-as the narrative moves between Hana’s struggle to survive in the 1940s, and Emi’s struggle with survivor’s guilt as an elderly woman-their sense of self and sisterhood endures. Reinforcing the book’s feminist thread, the women are from a fiercely proud lineage of haenyeo (female divers who harvest marine life from the ocean floor) on Japanese-occupied Jeju Island, Korea, where, unusually for the broader patriarchal society, they are the breadwinners.

The novel introduces 16-year-old Hana who, while protecting her little sister Emi, is forcibly taken away by a Japanese soldier to become a “comfort woman” for the Japanese army. Thrusting a forgotten corner of history into the light, and already eliciting comparisons with Memoirs of a Geisha and The Kite Runner, Bracht’s novel was pre-empted in the US and the UK for six-figure sums within hours of final edits at last year’s London Book Fair. I feel like my mother and her friends are survivors of their own histories,” Mary Lynn Bracht says, as she explains the inspiration behind her moving début, White Chrysanthemum (Chatto, January), which has seen her literary career come into bloom.

Mary lynn bracht