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Title: An Angel in Australia

Author: Tom Keneally

Narrator: Gary Down

Format: Unabridged

Length: 10 hrs and 24 mins

Language: English

Release date: 01-17-13

Publisher: Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd

Ratings: 2 of 5 out of 1 votes

Genres: Fiction, Historical

Publisher's Summary:

Sydney, 1942 - the year of the fall of Singapore, the bombing of Darwin, and the surprise attack on Sydney Harbour by Japanese midget submarines. Australia is surely doomed to fall to the Japanese....

In the confessional, Father Frank Darragh hears how his community is changing - how the very real fear of invasion by the Japanese is leading people to challenge what the church teaches is right or wrong. Under the threat of death, people do things they would never dream of in peacetime. Especially vulnerable are those women whose husbands have been captured in Singapore or the Western desert. Facing the future alone and unprotected, they are at the risk of succumbing to the charms of more subtle invaders, American servicemen.

When one of Father Darragh's fallen parishioners, the young working-class wife of an Australian POW, is found brutally murdered, she takes on the character of a victim of war in the mind of the impressionable young priest. His obsession with her lost soul runs deeper than he will admit and leads Darragh on a dangerous journey of personal discovery - one that puts his own life at risk....

Critic Reviews:

"A wonderful entertainment, a showcase of Keneally's masterly skills...." (The Adelaide Advertiser)

Members Reviews:

Four Stars

Well written & gives a good insight into the inner workings of the priesthood.......

Good Read

A very interesting book in relation to the nursing profession in the First World War. Tom Keneally always gives you plenty of Australian History.

Dead angels and impotent demons

This is a great book from Tom Keneally. He has produced a fine character study of the torment and maturing of a young priest, Frank Darragh, set in wartime Sydney, with a background of the Japanese bombings in northern Australia and the midget submarine incursion in Sydney harbour.

Keneally provides beautiful portraits of the parishioners, the matrons who `wore support hose under their big tents of floral dresses, their thickening ankles putting stress on the leather bulwarks of their plain shoes.' Even with such an economy of words, you can picture and feel these women who `lived virtuously, but without fuss.' And wartime Sydney is brought to life.

There is a great cast of characters, the money grubbing, world weary monsignor, tragic parishioners (dying and murdered), the gentle monks of Kangaroo valley, brash US MPs, a brutalised `coloured' deserter, an impotent serial killer, a communist saviour and all the machinations of St Mary's cathedral to preserve the good name of the church. And of course, we could hardly have a book featuring the Catholic Church without meeting a paedophile priest along the way.

You also have to respect a book which concludes with a war torn world surveyed from Shit Hill - Australian to the core!