Shame and the Captives
The Tom Keneally Collection
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Tom Keneally 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.
What most challenges Alice and the town is the foreignness of the Japanese compound and its culture. 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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
From the Man Booker Prize–winning author of Schindler’s Ark comes a masterful novel about WWII prisoner of war camps in the Australian countryside. With deep insight into human nature, Keneally explores his story from the perspectives of multiple players—from the local residents charged with minding the strangers in their midst to the Japanese and Italian captives.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The author of Schindler s List again novelizes a small yet revealing event from World War II. Based on the 1944 Cowra breakout in New South Wales, Australia, the novel interweaves perspectives of people in and around the fictional Gawell prisoner-of-war camp, where Japanese captives suffer less from conditions than from living with the shame of having been captured while more amiable Italian prisoners work on local farms, sing, or share news. The novel opens during the spring of 1943, after Italy has joined the Allies. Keneally explores the lives and innermost thoughts of, among others, Abercare, the English camp commandant trying to avoid conflict with his wife, his prisoners and his subordinates; Suttor, the radio writer in charge of Compound C, more in touch with his surly unpredictable prisoners than his commanding officer; Emily, Abercare s unhappy wife; Nevski, the intelligent Russian-born translator. Keneally depicts the tragic reach of the war on a number of different lives, including the horror of a war crime and the neatness of the cover-up. Other writers may be more adept at portraying female emotions or dinner-party chatter, but no one equals Keneally for documenting the actions of human beings caught up in war, some desperate to hold onto their humanity, others desperate to die.
