An Angel in Australia

By: Tom Keneally

Narrated by: Gary Down

Sydney, 1942 - the year of the fall of Singapore, the bombing of Darwin, and the surprise attack on Sydney Harbour by Japanese midget submarines. Australia is surely doomed to fall to the Japanese....

In the confessional, Father Frank Darragh hears how his community is changing - how the very real fear of invasion by the Japanese is leading people to challenge what the church teaches is right or wrong. Under the threat of death, people do things they would never dream of in peacetime. Especially vulnerable are those women whose husbands have been captured in Singapore or the Western desert. Facing the future alone and unprotected, they are at the risk of succumbing to the charms of more subtle invaders, American servicemen.

When one of Father Darragh's fallen parishioners, the young working-class wife of an Australian POW, is found brutally murdered, she takes on the character of a victim of war in the mind of the impressionable young priest. His obsession with her lost soul runs deeper than he will admit and leads Darragh on a dangerous journey of personal discovery - one that puts his own life at risk....

©2002 The Serpentine Publishing Co. (Pty) Ltd. (P)2004 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd

Critic reviews

"A wonderful entertainment, a showcase of Keneally's masterly skills...." ( The Adelaide Advertiser)