The Daughters of Mars

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. Here, new outrages – gas, shell-shock – present themselves. 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. 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 obscure but strong women caught in the great mill of history.

About the Author :
Thomas (Tom) Keneally was born in Sydney in 1935. Of Irish descent, he trained for several years for the Catholic priesthood but did not take orders. He worked as a school teacher, clerk and drama teacher. In the mid-1960s Keneally embarked on an extraordinary career as a writer, with remarkable success in Australia and overseas. He has won many prestigious literary awards. He won the Booker Prize in 1982 and has won the Miles Franklin Award twice. Jane Nolan is a gifted actor who has worked extensively in theatre and audiobook narration.  She received the Green Room Award for Best Actress for her performance in Faith Healer and was an Award nominee for her role in The Winter's Tale (Eleventh Hour). She is a graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts, and has a Bachelor of Arts Honours degree in English literature from Sydney University.

Review :
"No Australian author has written more eloquently or extensively of war than Tom Keneally...Now, at last and triumphantly, there is a full-scale Keneally novel of the Great War...All of it is handled by Keneally with calm mastery. If epic is no longer a literary category that fits this world, THE DAUGHTERS OF MARS nonetheless has a tragic and humane span that few recent novels have attempted, let alone equalled." "Keneally, for decades one of Australia's most prominent and exuberant storytellers, has a passion for history that is infectious and irresistible. His new novel tackles - on an epic scale - the role of Australian nurses in World War I...Keneally's fascination with the roles of ordinary people like these young women play in momentous events gives THE DAUGHTERS OF MARS its terrific energy and freshness." "The huge talents of Thomas Keneally are everywhere on display." "The translation into fiction of all that he uncovered is one of this novel's finest achievements. You sense a storymaker with his manuscript pegged out and in play, dotting in tiny facts, intricate details: innovations in medical practice and anaesthetics, even the different fashions worn by Australia's different state nurses. Here, he drops in the artistic philosophy of light; there, the surreality of travel to famous places; and then, the death of Joan of Arc, in five perfect paragraphs. The breadth and accretion of all this is dazzling, matched - and sometimes superseded - by the perfection of the intimate gestures and internal moments through which he vivifies his young women. What grief looks like as it works across somebody's lips; how human touch feels to someone more used to swabbing and stitching." "The skill of Tom Keneally is that he writes with a large scope on matters from the Irish diaspora to convict life in Australia, the Holocaust and now World War I, but his stories are engagingly intimate."