The Divine Wind Garry Disher 1998

Dustjacket synopsis:
"Friendship is a slippery notion. We lose friends as we change and our friends don't, or as we form other alliances, as we betray our friends or are ourselves betrayed...

"In the pearling town of Broome, against the backdrop of World War II, a young man and a young woman fall in love. Hart is the son of a pearling master, Mitsy the daughter of a Japanese diver. Can their love survive as Japan enters the war and Mitsy encounters prejudice and hate?

"In this beautifully written new novel, Garry Disher evokes a war-devasted Australia and its effects on young adults forced to leave their childhood behind."

First Paragraph

In the final weeks of 1941, when I was adrift in life and my sister was missing in a war zone, my father offered our home as sanctuary to a young Japanese woman named Mitsy Sennosuke, unaware that I was in love with her. This was in Broome, in the north-west, at the time of the invasion of Malaya, when Japanese bombs were falling like silver rain and old certainties were crumbling, when some who had been our friends were now treated as aliens, transfigured by emnity and fear.

My father, Michael Penrose, was a pearling master. He ran six luggers, crewed by Malays, Manilamen and Koepangers, with one Japanese diver on each lugger, and owned Penrose Chandlery Supplies, an airy tin-and-flywire shop situated at the head of the jetty that juts into Roebuck Bay.

From the Hodder paperback edition, 2003.

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Last modified: December 8, 2006.