Shame and the captives

By Thomas Keneally

Subjects: World war, 1939-1945, fiction, Japanese Prisoners and prisons, Large type books, Fiction, historical, general, World War, 1939-1945, Fiction, Australian Prisoners and prisons, History, Prisoners of war, Escapes, Australia, fiction

Description: Alice is a young woman living on her father-in-law's farm on the edge of an Australian country town, while her husband is held prisoner in Europe. When Giancarlo, an Italian anarchist at the prisoner-of-war camp down the road, is assigned to work on the farm, she hopes that being kind to him will somehow influence her husband's treatment. What she doesn't anticipate is how dramatically Giancarlo will expand her outlook and self-knowledge. But what most challenges Alice and her fellow townspeople is the utter foreignness of the thousand-plus Japanese inmates and their culture, which the camp commanders fatally misread. Mortified by being taken alive in battle and preferring a violent death to the shame of living, they plan an outbreak, to shattering and far-reaching effects on all the citizens around them. (Based on a true story.).