Six Brilliant Reads: War Novels for ANZAC Day

Deborah Challinor is one of New Zealand’s consistently best-selling authors, for her well researched historical fiction. White Feathers is the second book in her Children of War trilogy, following the story of Tamar Murdoch and her family through the generations, from settling in New Zealand through several wars. In the middle book, we follow Tamar’s children serving in Gallipoli and France as World War One intensifies. The following book, Blue Smoke, brings us through the Hawke’s Bay earthquake, then the Great Depression and into World War Two. History coming alive through memorable characters.

Focusing on World War I, Maxine Alteiro’s novel Lives We Leave Behind describes the wartime experiences of two New Zealand nurses who meet on the hospital ship that transports them to the theatre of war. A bond develops in spite of their different personalities as they care for injured soldiers in Egypt and France. There’s romance as well as insight into the life of Kiwi nurses during the war, their living conditions and challenges.

Olivia Spooner is fast making a name for herself as a writer of historical romance fiction that takes you to an different corner of World War II. In her latest book, The American Boys, we’re in Wellington, it’s 1942 and American soldiers have arrived to keep the Pacific safe. A romance sparks between Lorna and Stan, a Marine from Chicago. However complications arise when Alfie, Stan’s infuriating younger brother, turns up when Stan is sent to fight. Spooner shows 1940s New Zealand through American eyes in an interesting way and though there is a romantic thread to the story, family love also plays a part.

A Better Place by award winner Stephen Daisley describes the brutal effects of war, again World War II, on two brothers. Roy and Tony were twins, Roy serving in the North African desert, Tony killed on Crete. After the war, Roy builds a hut for himself above a creek at the family farm near Ohakune. The book fills in the back story, not sparing the reader the horrific injuries sustained by those under fire, the looting and exploitation of villagers, both the heroism and loss of nerve. So this is a no holds barred view of the war, vivid and real, but also elevated by Daisley’s poetic yet natural writing.

Saving Elli is Doug Gold’s third historical novel set during World War II, taking us to Nazi occupied Amsterdam where Jewish girl Elli is in hiding, concealed in the attic of Resistance couple Frits and Jo. Both risk their lives continually aiding Jewish fugitives, forging ID papers and sabotaging German aircraft. Can they hold out against an enemy closing in, or the betrayal of those they thought they could trust? Based on a true story, this is both a harrowing account of the atrocities of the war, but also an inspirational story of courage and the kindness of strangers.

The aftermath of the World War I is the focus of Carl Nixon’s stunning novel The Virgin and the Whale. It’s 1919 as Elizabeth waits for her husband even though he is missing in action, presumed dead. She keeps him alive for their young son, telling him a story about the adventures of a balloonist, also taking on the nursing of a returned soldier with amnesia following a traumatic head injury. Through her storytelling, the soldier also has a chance to heal, to reinvent himself.

Posted by JAM

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