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Publisher's Summary

In the spirit of The Daughters of Mars, Tom Keneally's new novel brilliantly explores the intimacies of ordinary lives being played out against momentous world events. In Gawell, New South Wales, a prisoner-of-war camp to house European, Korean and Japanese captives is built close to a farming community.

Alice is a young woman living a dull life with her father-in-law on his farm while her new husband first fights, then is taken prisoner, in Greece. When Giancarlo, an Italian POW and anarchist from Gawell's camp, is assigned to work on their farm, Alice's view of the world and her self-knowledge are dramatically expanded. But what most challenges Alice and the town is the foreignness of the Japanese compound and its culture, entirely perplexing to the inmates' captors.

Driven by a desperate need to validate the funerals already held for them in Japan, the prisoners vote to take part in an outbreak, and the bloodshed and chaos this precipitates shatter the certainties and safeties of all who inhabit the region.

©2013 Copyright © The Serpentine Publishing Company 2013. (P)2013 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd

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  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars
  • Nell
  • 02-20-17

Boring narration

I wish I had read rather than listened to this book. The story itself is interesting and probably exciting but the narrators sound like they are just reading because they have to, there is no passion in their storytelling and it absolutely ruined the book for me.

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  • Rodney Fielding
  • 08-31-16

Wartime history well told via fiction

This is Tom Keneally's engrossing version of a famous wartime incident, the Cowra breakout. As always his analysis of people and relationships is superb, and his grasp of military detail very good. Both readers were fine.