Medium Hardback with Dust-Jacket, Near New Condition, 2002, 336 pages, ISBN 1 86471 001 2

An Angel in Australia – Thomas Keneally

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 the fall to the Japanese…

Through the eyes of a naïve young priest we see into the hearts of a people who fear the end of life as they know it. 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 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 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…