Introducing Encore - a new monthly feature on Binge Reading - and Deborah Challinor, a top selling New Zealand historical fiction author and her latest book The Leonard Sisters,

This is where we talk to authors who have already been on the show about their latest book...

Nurse Rowie Leonard is pro war. Her younger sister, Jo is a protestor and they're both in Vietnam. Rowie is serving a 12 month tour of duty supporting the troops, serving overseas.

Jo is a folk singer and a fervent anti-war protestor who falls in love with a soldier and goes to Vietnam with a rock band, entertaining troops. As the sisters grapple with love. loss, and the stresses and sorrows of war, each will be forced to confront and question everything they've believed in.

The Leonard Sisters is the fourth book and concluding book in the popular The Restless Years series, a story about two sisters and the Vietnam war years of the late sixties.

The Binge Reading interview with Deborah on Book #3 in the series, The Jacaranda Tree, can be found here: https://thejoysofbingereading.com/deborah-challinor-best-selling-sagas/

LISTEN TO DEBORAH ON BINGE READING EPISODE

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Introducing The Leonard Sisters

Jenny Wheeler: Welcome to the show. Deborah. It's fantastic to have you with us. Tell us a bit about your interest in the Vietnam war, because you did also do a PhD thesis on it quite a few years ago didn't you? How did you get into it initially?

Deborah Challinor: I did my Ph.D in the nineties, and I've been interested in Vietnam since I went to university and I've first went to uni in the seventies.

I won’t say I tailored my studies towards Vietnam, but I did start thinking about doing some research towards Vietnam when I saw a documentary while I was at uni called Hearts and Minds, which was American, and it looked at all sorts of aspects of Vietnam from an American point of view and a Vietnamese point of view.

And it really started me thinking about the New Zealand contribution. And when I got to my master's, I wanted to do some research on the New Zealand contribution, but I got put off doing that and I put that aside until I got to my PhD.

But there was really not much at all, in terms of research, done in New Zealand and that just spurred me on to do some original research of my own. And that's how I got into it.

Academic research that sparked novel

Jenny Wheeler: Yes. Obviously, a history thesis is a very different proposition from a novel, and this is a very engrossing family story of the way that the war impacted on individuals and their emotional responses to it.

Jo, one of the sisters is an anti-war protestor who actually at the beginning has quite a black and white idea about right and wrong and almost villainizes as the soldiers who are going there.

She blames them, for being willing to take part in a conflict, even if they're professional soldiers, because in New Zealand, only volunteers went, nobody was actually drafted there.

Rowie was a military nurse. Who is about to take up a year-long post in a military hospital there. So they're very much on opposite sides of the fence aren't they?

It must have been interesting for you to set up those two opposite poles, right at the start of the story.

Deborah Challinor: It was, and I did that deliberately, so readers could have that contrast. And also against that, there are two other reasonably central characters who are soldiers, that’s Eddie and Sam, and they are cousins. They're in Victor 4 company and they're connected in a way to Rowie and Jo.