Hiroshima Sunset

In 2007, self-publishing author, Amanda Blackburn accepts an assignment in Japan to help 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.

Satan's Little Helpers

While watching the demolition of his old school Placidus College, Simon Hickey looks back on ten turbulent, life defining years during the fifties and sixties, when the first crop of Australia's baby boomers were awakening to their hormonal senses.

'Satan's Little Helpers' explores two vastly different institutional life experiences, as seen through the eyes of its narrator Simon Hickey. He first passes through the Catholic education system of the 1950's and 60's, including a year in a vocational training college, and a few years later is drafted into the Army for two years National Service. A fictional tale, these life-defining experiences are linked by a tender romance that defies Catholic conventions of the day, and will doubtless resonate with those who shared a similar fate in real life.

Andrea's Secret

Buried deep in the heart of every family, lies a story no one wants to tell. In early 1974, a pregnant Andrea Steedman leaves home to conceal the birth of her daughter Mary Therese. A few months after she has given birth, depressed and confused, she agrees to an adoption under highly irregular circumstances, a decision that sets in train a series of events that play out years later, and threaten to tear a family apart. The story unfolds in such a way that the reader is forced to take sides. A carefully crafted piece of writing keeps you guessing until the last few pages.

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.