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The
2004 Award
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Nominated by:
Publishers
of Nominated Editions: |
| An
Angel in Australia by
Tom Keneally also published as The Office of Innocence |
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| the complete A-Z listing of nominated authors |
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ABOUT
THE BOOK
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| 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 . . . Through the eyes of a naive 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 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 . . . |
| ABOUT THE AUTHOR |
| Thomas Keneally, born in 1934 in New South Wales, began his writing career in 1964 and has published 24 novels since. They include Schindler's Ark, which won the Booker Prize in 1982 and was subsequently made into the film Schindler's List, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Gossip from the Forest and Confederates, each of which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and his most recent novel, Bettany's Book. He has also written 7 works of non-fiction, including Homebush Boy, a memoir, and his latest, American Scoundrel. He is married with two daughters and lives in Sydney. |
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