Michaela Kolofsky

I suppose I was thinking about the way that war impacts on everyday life, on ordinary people.

And the two books that really stood out for me when I was thinking about this were The War Widow by Tara Moss, which is new.

It's the first book in a Billy Walker mystery series.

It's set in Sydney in 1946.

And Billy Walker is this kind of private detective or private inquirer.

who after the war, you know, probably wouldn't have been able to work in the way she could.

So she's an example of the way that women's worlds and women's work was really transformed by war.

But there are these characters all throughout the book who are from all over the world who've ended up in Australia, just trying to rebuild a life or remake a life.

And there are also people in the book who are, who've come back from war who've,

you know, suffered very serious physical injuries.

And sometimes in their case, their spouses have left them or they can't be re-employed by the army.

So they've also had to start again.

So you're seeing these other, all these other ways, all these other facets of people's lives because of the impact of the war.

And the other novel that really stood out for me when I think about the end of war or the aftermath of war is an episode of Sparrows by Ruma Godden.

So that's an interesting one.

It wasn't published till 1955, but I consider it a kind of a post-World War II book because the character in the story is a little girl called Lovejoy Mason and she finds a packet of seeds and there's nowhere in her

in her little working class street to plant those seeds because the Blitz destroyed everything.

And even though it's 1955, everything has kind of been destroyed still.

And she ends up planting this little packet of seeds in the rubble at the back of a churchyard.

And again, it gives you this other glimpse of, I guess, also the geography of a place that war affected so strongly that still hasn't recovered from that.