Cassie McCullagh

thinks at first is a child's hand, and then he realises with relief that it's a leaf, goes up to examine it closely and realise it's a severed monkey's paw swinging from a tree.

And with that extremely creepy but sort of wonderfully written start, we follow his journey into, as you say, that he has been at this important battle

And he's gone on patrol through the jungles of Assam in India, tracking the Japanese soldiers that have gone into the jungle after their defeat.

We then jump into him being safe back in England.

He's married a woman called Claire.

He's inherited a farm in Norfolk.

But he's struggling with what he saw during the war, and he's at a remove from essentially his normal life.

And so we get bursts of these sort of experiences that he had

in the jungle, being lost by himself, heading out with a patrol of soldiers, and then also part of the journey coming home.

And I think, for me anyway, the most interesting part is what he recounts or what he remembers

is his time with the Naga people who, as you said before, an indigenous tribe to the area that farmed the rice fields down in the valley.

But because of what's happened with this, that World War II has sort of intruded onto their lives, they've now been driven up high into the mountains and are living up there.

Absolutely.

And that's emphasised a lot of the time.

In fact, one time he sort of snaps at his wife, Claire, saying, what you understand of the war is from like the times.

And it seems he almost doesn't even have the words to kind of explain it to her.

It also sort of must be said that while the setting is a very unfamiliar setting, perhaps a little bit more familiar to an Australian reader than a British reader, I thought, because of War in the Pacific and

that we do have stories about Burma and about Kokoda, say, that, you know, this similar kind of dense jungle experience is part of our kind of collective World War II memory in this part of the world.

But he himself is a very familiar character, I thought, that kind of aloof British officer that's this very internal person who is a bit stiff up a lip but inside has –

you know, all these things going on and is a man kind of falling apart.