The daughters of Mars A novel

Review by New York Times Review

Serving as nurses, two Australian sisters confront the horrors of Gallipoli and the Western Front. LONG before I could locate the peninsula of Gallipoli on a map, as a Briton I knew it as a place where we did something awful to the Australians. Down Under they have a clearer memory. Having fought bravely and loyally for king and empire in two world wars, they have ever shaken the belief that they were used as cannon fodder when Britain (and France) launched a disastrous attack on this strategic outpost of the Ottoman Empire in 1915. The operation, which proved a fiasco, has assumed special significance in Australia. Coming just 14 years after the Australian commonwealth was formed, it represented a first entrance onto the world stage and, as such, proved a cornerstone of a new national identity. Even now, the anniversary of the landing of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps in Gallipoli, April 25, is a day of remembrance in both countries. Less trumpeted but more effective was Australia's subsequent role on the Western Front, where the Australian Imperial Force, comprising five divisions and more than 120,000 soldiers, held offa major German offensive in early 1918 and contributed to the Allied victory later that year. Australia lost 8,700 men at Gallipoli, but five times more in northern France. Thomas Keneally, the celebrated Australian author of "Schindler's List" and numerous other books, isn't the first writer to revisit these two chapters of World War I. But in his poignant new novel, "The Daughters of Mars," he does so almost tangentially. Keneally takes us neither to the beaches of Gallipoli nor to the trenches of the Somme. In fact, soldiers are for the most part extras in a far more intimate drama - that of the nurses who volunteered to look after the diggers, as the Australian soldiers were known. War was, of course, never far away: doctors and nurses had necessarily to be close to the action. But more often they saw it through its grisly aftermath: human bodies savaged by shells, bullets, shrapnel, trench foot, gangrene, mustard gas, typhoid or shell shock. "On a cot before them," Keneally writes, "lay a man whose wound once unbandaged showed a face that was half steak, and no eyes. The lack of features made his age impossible to guess." We soon learn a great deal more about missing limbs, amputations, infections, hemorrhages and diseases. And how to live alongside death. Holding together an occasionally rambling narrative are Naomi and Sally Durance, the daughters of a New South Wales dairy farmer. After both become nurses, the older and more self-confident Naomi escapes to Sydney, leaving Sally to work in a local hospital and care for their dying mother. As Sally builds up the courage to end her mother's suffering with an overdose of morphine, Naomi returns home. Two nights later, their mother dies with Naomi by her side and Sally immediately understands that "Naomi had done the right, fierce, loving and hard thing Sally had meant to do." Keneally returns frequently to Sally's mixed sense of guilt and relief over her mother's death, with her own role as accomplice binding her to Naomi in a new and unspoken way. Yet their experience of war, starting on the Archimedes, a hospital ship anchored two miles offGallipoli, finally seals a bond that never seemed possible back home. As the wards are quickly filled by wounded and dying diggers, Naomi and Sally also find solace in the comradeship of a group of nurses who will accompany them through the course of the novel. War comes still closer when the Archimedes, briefly turned into a troop ship, is struck by a torpedo. Keneally's description of the chaos that follows is masterly. With Naomi and Sally tipped into the sea, struggling to find a raft, "huge metal shrieks and thumps could be heard within the ship and the unearthly lament of mules and ponies went on." As the ship slides into the deep, "a horse with bulging eyes came swimming up, the sort they might use to pull cannon," and holding on to its mane "was that little prune of a woman Rosanna Nettice," another of the nurses. Before they're rescued, Keneally offers Britons his only reminder of the absurdity of asking Australians to fight a war almost 10,000 miles from home. "May I point out," an orderly called Kiernan remarks, "that it's your crowd who want us here, beating our heads against the Turks. We are doing your Empire a favor." The surviving doctors, nurses and orderlies set up base on the island of Lemnos until Christmas 1915, when the Allies abandon their Gallipoli debacle. Meanwhile, Naomi is ordered home for illegally visiting a nurse who has been punished for consorting with a soldier. Once in Australia, she and a beloved friend (a woman who lost a leg after the Archimedes went down) start planning their return to the fray. And in no time, they're helping the eccentric wife of an English aristocrat set up an Australian Voluntary Hospital in northern France. "The Daughters of Mars" is a long book, with ample room for multiple characters and numerous subplots, not a few involving love affairs between our circle of nurses and assorted doctors, orderlies and soldiers. But by the spring of 1916 it's the carnage on the Western Front that consumes everyone's attention. Sally finds herself in a field hospital near Rouen, where her first patients are wounded Germans. She is then reassigned to a casualty clearing station a few miles from the trenches. As always, speed is of the essence in saving lives. But with soldiers the real pressure is to repair them so they can resume fighting. In many hospitals, as they're brought in for treatment (or early burial), the nurses mark them 1, 2, 3, according to their readiness for more war. It's a grim ritual, but Keneally makes it all seem natural. Fiction permits coincidences, so by the time Naomi and her friend reach France, Sally and most of the other nurses from the Archimedes are just a bicycle, truck or train ride away. Free moments are found to visit Paris and, in Sally's case, lose her virginity. There are also major setbacks in the war that, our nurses conclude, are only reversed by the appearance of Australian troops: "The fact that these were of her tribe and looked unflustered seemed like a curative for the Allied retreat and evoked in Sally and the others a primitive urge for celebration." The nurses run beside them, cheering wildly. "Leonora yelled, Gidday, boys! to them, and the men said, Crikey, it's Australian nurses. And men roared out that they were going to go and get the dingoes." Through Naomi, Sally and their friends, Keneally draws the war to a close. But while the story has epic dimensions, it stays close to these "daughters of Mars" and leaves us worrying how peace will treat them. Without revealing more, even Keneally seems unsure of what awaits. This matters little. He has rescued forgotten heroines from obscurity and briefly placed them center stage. THE DAUGHTERS OF MARS By Thomas Keneally 517 pp. Atria Books. $28. It's your crowd who want us here, beating our heads against the Turks. We are doing your Empire a favor.' Alan Riding is a former European cultural correspondent for The Times. His most recent book is "And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 18, 2013]

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Review by Booklist Review

Sally and Naomi Dorrance, grown sisters, aren't particularly close. Personality ­differences nudge them apart. Sally has stayed home on the family's farm in New South Wales and practices nursing close to home, while Naomi has fled to Sydney to nurse in wider, deeper waters. When their mother is verging on death, Naomi returns home, and the sisters perform an act that binds them in a peculiar way, as they now have to carry a guilty secret between them. Their world is opened drastically as they volunteer as nurses during WWI and are loaded onto a hospital ship treating Australian soldiers who have been wounded in the disastrous Battle of Gallipoli in Turkey. Their ship is torpedoed off the Greek islands, and the sisters' survival of a sinking ship is perhaps the most compelling and longest scene in this lengthy novel, the latest from the author of many distinguished historical novels, including Schindler's List (1982). The sisters end up nursing on the western front, and, in the end, it is their nursing experiences, their having to face countless horrors of loss of life and limb, that become the true meaning of their sisterly bond. Greatly detailed, alternately fast moving and slow, this story boasts authentic characters set in equally authentic locations. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Active advertising and scheduling of the author for interviews make up a portion of the publisher's large publicity campaign for this book.--Hooper, Brad Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

The horrific butcher's bill of WWI trench fighting, which took a toll not only on the wounded soldiers but on the doctors and nurses who tended to them, is at the heart of this moving epic novel from the author of Schindler's List. The story is told through the experiences of two sisters, Sally and Naomi Durance, both nurses, who enter the morally complex area of treating the devastatingly injured with peacetime experience. Eight months before the call went out from the Australian government for military nurses, Naomi apparently used some extra morphine that Sally had procured to end their mother's suffering from inoperable cervical cancer. The euthanasia both drew the siblings together in a conspiracy of silence and created a barrier between them. Their duties take them to Egypt and Europe, as they struggle to stay alive, and to stay mentally composed despite the awful situations they must confront. By again using individuals to humanize a larger story, Keneally succeeds in conveying the experience to his readers in a manageable way. Agent: Amanda Urban, ICM. (Aug. 10) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

In this latest from Booker Prize-winning author Keneally (Schindler's List), Australian sisters Naomi and Sally Durance volunteer as nurses at the beginning of World War I. Initially posted to a medical ship off the coast of Greece, they survive a shipwreck and are eventually transferred to the European front in France, Sally to a clearing station and Naomi to a hospital established by an eccentric viscountess. Though the sisters' viewpoints are seemingly limited, their service is a testament to the scope of war, as the number and nature of casualties they treat range from shrapnel and bayonet wounds to gassing, trench foot, shell shock, and finally the Spanish flu. Along the way we meet an unforgettable cast of supporting characters, including the resolute Matron Mitchie, returning to the front with a prosthetic leg, and Quaker Ian Kiernan, who volunteers for medical service but refuses a transfer to combat. VERDICT Keneally must have done copious research, but historical details and information about wartime medical treatment are presented organically, without the weight of historical retrospection. His ambiguous ending helps the reader bear the unbearable. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 1/6/13.]-Christine -DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Minnesota Libs., Minneapolis (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Australian novelist Keneally (Schindler's List, 1982, etc.) turns to his native country in a time of war. Anticipating the centennial of World War I by a shade, Keneally constructs a Winds of Warlike epic concerning figures whom only Ernest Hemingway, among the first-tier writers, got to: military nurses. Naomi and Sally Durance are two sisters who join the Nursing Corps in 1915 and sail off to Gallipoli, where they witness terrible things and form bonds of attachment with the wounded soldiers who suffer them; no one with a sensitive stomach will want to read Keneally's descriptions of their wounds. Crossing the Mediterranean, they experience the further terror of being torpedoed. Keneally's set piece, which takes up nearly a tenth of this long but economical book, is extraordinarily moving, if often quite gruesome ("Within the ambit of Lemnos floated a boat with four putrefying dead soldiers and three dead nurses in it"). Since Keneally has established soldiers and nurses alike as characters, the reader experiences their loss. Only on arriving at the Western Front do the sisters part, and there they discover "a dimension of barbarity that had not existed on Gallipoli and had been undreamed of in Archimedes," namely the terror of gas warfare. There, too, each falls in love, which, this being a war story, cannot end well for the both; it is only the love-story element that does not entirely work in Keneally's book, though it seems inevitable. For all that, Keneally is a master of character development and period detail, and there are no false notes there. Fans of Downton Abbey and Gallipoli alike will find much to admire in Keneally's fast-moving, flawlessly written pages.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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The Daughters of Mars Murdering Mrs. Durance It was said around the valley that the two Durance girls went off but just the one bothered to come back. People could not have said which one, since both the girls were aloof and looked similar--dark and rather tall. There was confusion even in the local paper. And they weren't the sort of girls whose names were called across streets--girlfriend hallooing girlfriend in the excitement of Kempsey's big shopping days. Before the war it was the younger one--wasn't it?--who stayed at home with her parents. The slightly shorter one, anyhow. And it was she who took her mother, Mrs. Durance, to visit the surgeon in Sydney. But what could those Macquarie Street doctors do? • • • After a choppy night's passage down the coast aboard the Currawong, Mrs. Durance finally fell asleep off Broken Bay, only to be woken, as the steamer entered the Sydney Heads, by a steward bearing tea--Sally being on deck at the time for the experience of the approach to Port Jackson. Mother and daughter had time for another cup of tea at the wharf in Darling Harbour before Sally took the exhausted Mrs. Durance to the surgeon's rooms in Macquarie Street. After an examination by this eminent man, she was sent from his office to Sydney Hospital for X-rays. Then she and Sally met up with Naomi, the other daughter, the one who was considered a bit flash--Macleay District Hospital not good enough for her--who'd been in Sydney a few years. They went that afternoon for a bang-up tea at Cahill's, while they waited for the expert men who read the body's inner secrets from photographs to discover what was wrong with Mrs. Durance. The sisters knew their mother had understated her pain to them. They knew she was secretive about the scale of her bleeding and the urine coming out of the wrong opening. That night, Naomi put them up in her little flat in Bondi Junction--Mama sharing Naomi's bed, Sally on the sofa. They could have all stayed at Mrs. Durance's younger sister Jackie's place at Randwick, but Mrs. Durance didn't want to share news of her health problems with her sister yet. Both Sally and Naomi woke several times to their mother's choked-down groans. But unblunted ambition seemed to declare itself the next morning in the briskness with which Naomi put on her uniform and her scarlet cape to go to her duty at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital. There had always been something larger than her beginnings written in Naomi Durance's gestures and her long bones. Her parents knew it. She had left them for the city, but in so far as they were boastful, they boasted of her. Sally worked a mere three miles from home, across the river, at the Macleay District Hospital. Merit in that, no one denied, and loyalty. But it was news of Naomi that made eyes shine on the Durance farm. It was cervical cancer, the surgeon told Mrs. Durance the next morning. There was no option of an operation, for it would be a very long, painful, and dangerous procedure, and could not hope to get all of the proliferating cancer. Surgery was to be recommended chiefly in the early stages, whereas metastasis had already occurred, as the X-rays showed. If she rested well and ate lots of fruit, he said, she could expect to live at least a year. She was a dairy farmer's wife? Well, no more butter churning, he said, and no early morning milking. He would give her a script for pain medicine, he told her. He would also be writing to her doctor in the Macleay so that he could keep her comfortable. You are fortunate to have two daughters who are registered nurses, he told her. I am, she said, glowing with pride but hollowed by pain. She and Sally caught the regular outward journey of the Currawong home the next night. Naomi saw them off at Darling Harbour, in the shadow of those shameful slums of the Rocks. From them bubonic plague had come boiling forth in the girls' childhoods and been carried north on the Currawong by a rat nestled in a furniture case. Naomi waited in their small cabin until the last call to go ashore and then stayed on the wharf to wave a futile handkerchief, as if she were part of one of those heartbreaking paintings of emigrant farewell. She's so beautiful, isn't she, Sal? asked Mrs. Durance, leaning on the railing from pain rather than as a gesture of languid seafaring. She has a lot of grace, doesn't she? As they reached on a black tide for Dawes Point, the handkerchief still waved, more luminous than Naomi's face. Bush people did that handkerchief-waving stuff and it gave them away as hayseeds. But worldly Naomi risked that tonight. She had promised she'd come up as often as she could and help Sally out. But that she would remain a city woman was not questioned. It was a brisk night, and Mrs. Durance developed a cold on top of all else. She again fell asleep late. Again Sally came on deck at dawn and looked out at the blue surge of the tide breaking on the yellow sand of Trial Bay and making enough water at the river bar to allow the Currawong to enter. • • • For six months Mrs. Durance ate her fruit and sat in sumps of sunlight on the veranda. But the cancer owned her by night. Sally still worked the day shift at Macleay District but now slept on call in the same room as her mother, her father having moved to a lean-to at the back of the homestead. Sally was to administer a sixth of a grain of morphine hypodermically when brave and reticent Mrs. Durance confessed, one way or another, to agony. Naomi took her holidays and came home on a visit and gave her sister a break from the regimen. In between, Mr. Durance paid their neighbor Mrs. Sorley's girl to sit with Mrs. Durance by day and was attentive himself. Since Mr. Sorley had been killed by a native cedar--which when cut had slipped sidewards rather than forwards--the Sorley kids were ever ready for employment. Sally noticed more clearly now that though her father and mother were souls of decency, Eric Durance moved about the bedroom as if he and his wife were acquaintances only. He seemed to fear he might be seen as an intruder. There had always been that distant courtesy between her parents. Sally knew they'd infected Naomi and her with it too. It might be one of the reasons Naomi had cleared out--in the hope that on a different stage she might have a franker soul. Mrs. Durance suffered so much night pain that she frequently told Sally she was praying to God for death. These were remarkable and dramatic things for her to say and--since she had always had contempt for overstatement--would be forced out of her only by the fiercest anguish. In the seventh month of it, Naomi came back from Sydney again to sit with her mother by day and share the night watch. The second night she was home, Sally slept in her own room while Naomi took up post in Mrs. Durance's room on the camp cot, a surface of canvas no blanket could soften. Naomi was meant to wake Sally at four so that she could take over, but did not come rapping on her door till near dawn. Naomi was in a dress and boots and her eyes looked smeared after gales of tears. Mama's gone, she said. I'm sorry, Mama's gone. I ran over to the Sorleys' and asked their boy to ride into town to get Dr. Maddox. Sally stammered with a confused and bitter grief and went to go off at once down the hallway. Naomi took her shoulders and gazed at her, straight into her face. Naomi's eyes seemed full of conspiracy. To Sally she had the eyes of a co-murderer. At that instant their shared mercy and their crime drew them together so utterly that they were no longer city and country nurses but sisters once more of the same womb. You didn't wake me for my shift, said Sally. It wasn't necessary, Naomi asserted, frankly, with her gaze on her. She went before it was time to wake you. Let me see her. I washed her and laid her out. Without me? I wanted you to sleep. I burned her nightdresses and the rags she used and took all the tonics and pounded the bottles to dust. Especially that rhubarb concoction Mrs. Sorley swore by. There was indeed still a taint of smoke in the air. Naomi led her sister by the hand and they walked down the hallway to the plain room they had both been conceived in. Blackbutt walls hemmed in the dim corridors they loved and hated, which seemed to pull Sally closer to home but which had proved to be escape avenues for Naomi. There was her mother--gray-faced, prepared, serene--the girl she had been at some time visible again in these features delivered of pain. Sally heard herself howl and went to her mother's body, kissing the face. The skin of the dead yielded differently. They were beyond pain but past affection too. She kissed the hand. It smelled of the scented soap Naomi had washed the corpse with. This too was proof of death. The living mother smelled of workaday Sunlight soap. Sally found herself on her knees, still caressing the hand, Naomi standing behind and above her. Naomi, who always presumed to do things first. Sally did not know whether to hate her, to attack her eyes, or fall flat in gratitude and wonder. Standing with a purpose in mind, she noticed the hypodermic needle, the morphine solution they had made up of pills actually prescribed by Dr. Maddox, and the unused bottled tablets in case the old doctor wanted to inspect them or return them to stock. She went to the dresser, was poleaxed with loss by the mother-of-pearl hairbrush with strands of her mother's hair in it. She knew the little drawer where her mother kept her subdued pink lipstick and her beige face powder. Yes, said Naomi, you should put some color on her poor face. It was a prayer--not an order--and Sally set to. The stolen reserve of morphine she had put together to finish her mother had been in the towel and linen cupboard in the hallway. How had Naomi found it? You could bet the solution Naomi had made up and injected for mercy's sake had been poured out, and the spare illicit tablets Sally had filched from Macleay District consigned to fire with the rhubarb tonic. To Sally--putting rouge and color into her mother's cheeks--it seemed knowledge grew between Naomi and her without them looking at each other. Yesterday they had been near strangers. Now they were altered. A different kind of reserve was imposed on them, and a different intimacy. Is Papa up? Sally asked. Does he know? Not yet. I was frightened. Will we tell him in a moment? Perhaps let the poor fellow rest a few more minutes. For he would need to do the milking even on the morning of his wife's death. But she finds it hard to face him, Sally perceived. Naomi--who had tried to avoid the weight of home and its taint of illness--had certainly assumed the weight now. She'd taken up station on the far side of the bed, across from where Sally, on her knees, put reasonable Methodist coloration on the poor, released features. Naomi said, I didn't have any idea till I came home that it was as bad as that. Her pain was the whole world to her. She could see nothing but it. Well, not any longer. Sally was engrossed with her mother. It was easy, Mama, to steal what you needed. I cut out two pages from the drugs record book. Former nurses who had managed the drugs register had done similar excisions because they did not approve of some missed or untidily written entry. Then for your dear sake I copied the dosages on fresh pages, adding an extra dose of an eighth of a grain of morphine in this case and that, until I'd created a phantom two grains, which I then fetched from the drugs cabinet and brought home to you. It's unlikely a doctor or matron will remember a specific dose as months go by. But I don't care if they do. She had kept the tablets hidden behind the bed linen in the hallway dresser. These two grains when mixed in solution and injected would bear away disease and the fuss of enduring all useless treatment. They would reach deep into the body and halt the mechanism of agony. And had now. She kissed her mother's brow before gracing it with the powder. Eric Durance would be astonished by his wife's beauty in death. Naomi declared, I gave her half a grain and we kissed and held hands, though I had to be careful--a touch would break her bones. Then she went. You were standing over her? said Sally. They both knew how rare it was that a patient expired while the nurse was standing there to observe and hold a hand. The dead went almost secretively. By good fortune, said Naomi without flinching but without bothering to look at her sister. By good fortune I was there. Again, Sally's astonishment that Naomi had done the right, fierce, loving, and hard thing Sally had meant to do! Even in this she was not to be outshone, the half-mad Sally thought. But Naomi was there because she had found the secret cache and took the burden of soothing her mother's breath down to nothing. A solemn loss and rejoicing were the day's order--Mama's freedom now from a world she had never since their babyhoods seemed accustomed to. As for her children, they must now get accustomed to something new. To new love and new hate and mutual shame. The roads being firm just then, Dr. Maddox arrived by motor at midmorning. The town--ignorant of medicine--loved him for his kindliness and punctuality and a lack of airs in a place where a doctor could easily play the grand wizard. But the hospital staff knew he was one of those tosspots who could carry it off well; that some unforgettable and disabling past event drove him to it. Though he performed surgery only when the other town doctors were not available, he was still a better surgeon when sober than most country doctors. It was peripheral things he was negligent at--paperwork, including death certificates. His method with the town at large was to hide it all behind an air of universal brotherhood and to breathe an impeccably mentholated breath over the sickbeds of the shire. That Saturday morning Dr. Maddox came to lower his face over Mrs. Durance and to ask Naomi about the last injection and how many grains, and to accept what she said and then breathe, Good woman--good, poor woman. Then he prepared a medical certificate, which he showed Naomi and Sally and which said Mrs. Durance had died of cancer, nephritis, and exinanition. There were in the valley many people Dr. Maddox had certified as dying of nephritis and exinanition. Nephritis and exinanition was the cited verdict all along both banks of the river and inland to the blue, wooded hills where the timber workers camped and always died of nephritis and exinanition, unless a tree fell on them. Farmers who had taken poison to escape the bank had their death certificates compassionately marked by Maddox with that saving formula. This morning of the death, over tea Sally made while keeping her eyes from straying to Naomi, Dr. Maddox sat at the kitchen table and spoke for a while to the girls' father. These were very much men's mutterings, half-embarrassed and platitudinous. Their father wore large, mute features, the same he brought to his labors. They had not yet crumbled in grief but somehow promised soon to do so. • • • Sally had less reason to stay in the Macleay Valley now. She was maybe a year beyond the age girls left home for marriage. Her sister had returned to her Sydney duties. Mr. Durance took sturdily to his work and employed the Sorley boys when needed. But Sally did not yet feel entitled to go. To flee would be obscene. It would be an insult to her mother's spirit. Her sister could escape because escape was her forte. She'd managed the trick before. But while it was easy for strangers to declare Eric Durance independent--a freestanding fellow--he did not seem so rugged to Sally. The country hospital had its own retaining power too. On the Wednesday following her mother's funeral she found that a fourteen-year-old boy with peritonitis she was nursing had died in the night, and she believed her stinging tears were a debt paid to her mother and a sort of tax paid to the valley. So by horseback, or more often by sulky, she continued traveling in her uniform--along the broad yellow-earth road and unreliable bridge over the river--to and from the home at Sherwood. She was a figure located essentially amidst the green paddocks, one who could not glibly get away. It was in the corridors during her night shifts that the mercy they'd given her mother took on the demeanor of a crime never to be argued away. Did I do it because I was tired? Fed up with all-day working and all-night watching? In the nurses' cubicle at the end of a public ward which contained--with all injuries and diseases there present combined and counted--no pain such as that of her mother's, Sally wept without consolation, since no night pleadings from an entire hospital of patients seemed to come close to the daytime pleadings she'd heard from her dead but eternal mother. This young woman of twenty-two--or near twenty-three--years was considered by those who bothered to see her to be possessed by a wistfulness which some people thought represented that greatest crime of bush towns: aloofness, flashness. Either that, or she was a cause for sympathy. A spinster-in-training. Excerpted from The Daughters of Mars by Tom Keneally All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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