Michael Kelly

Dr Michael Kelly has taught mathematics to high-school students and the history and philosophy of science to tertiary students. A schoolboy during the second world war, he was young enough to experience its end as a departure from normality, discovering for the first time that food did not have to be rationed and that ice cream did not have to be white. One of his uncles was captured in Crete, another flew with the RAF's Coastal Command, and his family befriended American sailors awaiting orders to join the Pacfic war. Memories of that time, and of its zeitgeist of self-sacrifice grafted onto ordinary life, were burned permanently into his consciousness. At he same time he was already questioning the ethics of military conflict in what was essentially a philosophical way, and his religious upbringing stimulated the beginnings of sympathy for Australia's enemies.

Well-known Australian author Blanche d'Alpuget summarised her reaction in the following words: "It's a beautifully balanced, never-flagging story that drew me in from the word go. It is also very poignant: I often had tears in my eyes."

The novel looks at ordinary life and common attitudes between the wars, and at Bomber Command, prisoner-of-war camps, and post-war destruction in Germany. It does not attempt a definitive answer to the debate about whether saturation bombing in World War II was justified, but it leans towards rejecting that strategy; and if there is a single over-arching theme it is that humanity transcends national allegiances. It is set in the past; but by focussing on the lives of ordinary people caught up in conflicts too big to understand, it will I hope provoke thought on what could lie ahead if we cannot find an alternative to war to solve our differences.