HIROSHIMA SUNSET...

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In 2007, self-publishing author, Amanda Blackburn agrees to an assignment in Japan to investigate and clear the name of a former soldier who served in the occupation army in 1946. The soldier’s damning exploits are revealed in a journal written by an unidentified veteran. On arrival in Japan, however, Amanda soon discovers that things are not quite as they seemed.

A tender love story set against the background of the all-but-forgotten Australian military contingent, which made up the bulk of the British Commonwealth Occupation Force, sent to Japan in February 1946 following Japan's surrender at the end of WW2. Assigned responsibility for the Hiroshima prefecture by General Douglas MacArthur, thousands of Australian soldiers began disarming the Japanese war machine, and repatriating Japanese soldiers returning home. They were ensconced into an area shattered and contaminated by a nuclear bomb, where civilians were suffering serious physical and psychological trauma. Inevitably, some of the soldiers fell in love. This is one such story.

Saints and Relics

A casket containing a remarkable relic of a 17th Century nun, Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, is stolen from a devout society in France by one of its members, a priest from Sydney. The priest, Father James, secretly entrusts the casket to two women in Monterey Creek, a small country town in New South Wales. The Society immediately sends Monsignor Henri Pascal from Paris to Australia to recover both the relic and a manuscript written by the nun, which describes her final revelation. When one of the women dies suddenly, and her house ransacked, the Monsignor becomes embroiled in the town's affairs, including the local parish priest's involvement with a single mother whose daughter claims to have had a vision of the Virgin Mary. When tragedy strikes during the Monterey Creek annual Festival of the Flowers, events threaten the Monsignor's quest to find the stolen relics.