The Daughters of Mars: The Tom Keneally Collection

Tom Keneally

Jun 2012 · Random House Australia

About this ebook

Inspired by the journals of Australian nurses who gave their all to the Great War effort and the men they nursed, The Daughters of Mars is vast in scope yet extraordinarily intimate. A stunning tour de force to join the best First World War literature, and one that casts a penetrating light on the lives of women caught in the great mill of history.

Naomi and Sally Durance are daughters of a dairy farmer from the Macleay Valley. Bound together in complicity by what they consider a crime, when the Great War begins in 1914 they hope to submerge their guilt by leaving for Europe to nurse the tides of young wounded.

They head for the Dardanelles on the hospital ship Archimedes. Their education in medicine, valour and human degradation continues on the Greek island of Lemnos, then on the Western Front. Everywhere they are confronted by new outrages - gas, shell-shock and broken men.

Naomi encounters the wonderful, eccentric Lady Tarlton, who is founding a voluntary hospital near Boulogne; Sally serves in a casualty clearing station close to the front. They meet the men with whom they would wish to spend the rest of their lives.

An extraordinary portrait of two ordinary young women.

Ratings and reviews

It's as well that Keneally can spin a good tale since that's often all that keeps you plodding through this work; it's long-winded, strangely punctuated and has some grammatical clunkers. What editor thought it acceptable to have us told four times that a red tab on a soldier's collar denoted a staff general? (In fact it was a mark of any staff officer.) The principle dramatic device of the novel is introduced and hashed over early in the book but later appears only in flashes like the flapping tail of a dying fish. At the end of the work, he plays an unnecessary and pointless trick on the reader. This from the author of the tautly written and powerful work Bring Larks and Heroes. Nonetheless, Keneally can evoke place, draw character and do dialogue with conviction. His treatment of the nurses is sympathetic without lapsing into mawkishness and he should be applauded for bringing their story to a wider audience.

About the author

Tom Keneally won the Booker Prize in 1982 with Schindler's Ark, later made into the Steven Spielberg Academy Award-winning film Schindler's List. His non-fiction includes the memoir Searching for Schindler and Three Famines, an LA Times Book of the Year, and the histories The Commonwealth of Thieves, The Great Shame and American Scoundrel. His fiction includes Shame and the Captives, The Daughters of Mars, The Widow and Her Hero, An Angel in Australia and Bettany's Book. His novels The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Gossip from the Forest, and Confederates were all shortlisted for the Booker Prize, while Bring Larks and Heroes and Three Cheers for the Paraclete won the Miles Franklin Award. In 2022, his novel Corporal Hitler's Pistol was awarded the ARA Historical Novel Prize.