A Soldier’s Tale
By M K Joseph
New Edition April 2010  |  RRP $29.99 
Harper Collins Publishers New Zealand

Normandy, 1944. In a small village near Bayeux, a young soldier comes across an isolated farmhouse, where a woman waits alone. As they talk, three grim-faced Frenchmen arrive to take her away for ‘questioning’, telling him she betrayed their Resistance colleagues to the Gestapo, through her SS lover. The soldier forces them to leave — but they all know he will eventually have to move on, and the woman will be theirs.

First published in 1976, A Soldier’s Tale by MK Joseph, one of New Zealand’s finest writers, is a devastating and unforgettable tale of love and betrayal. This enduring novel (a novella really) has been reprinted many times since its first release and was made into a movie.  It was runner-up in the Watties Book Awards (a forerunner to the New Zealand Post Book Awards) and has met with critical acclaim for its simple, powerful prose.

At the time it was first published I was a bookseller in Napier, Beattie & Forbes Bookshop, and I can remember to this day the huge impact the story had on me. I am so thrilled that Harper Collins have reissued this new edition. If you haven't read it previously be sure to do so now.

About the author:
Michael Kennedy Joseph is considered one of the most important New Zealand writers of the period between 1950 and 1970.  He became well-known for his science fiction, but is perhaps best remembered through his novel A Soldier’s Tale.

MK Joseph was born in England a month before the outbreak of World War I and emigrated to New Zealand with his family in 1924, settling in Tauranga.

Joseph attended Tauranga District High School (travelling five miles by horse), then Te Puke High School and, as a junior scholarship holder, Sacred Heart College, Auckland, where J C Reid and Dan Davin were among his lasting friends.

Joseph studied law at Auckland University College from 1931 for two years before transferring to a BA and MA in English (first class honours 1934). Also in his student years he served as special constable during the 1932 Queen Street Riots (with James Bertram and John Mulgan), and attended meetings of the Friends of the Soviet Union (with Robert Lowry and RAK Mason).

He continued his studies at Oxford University, where his graduation coincided with the outbreak of World War II.  He joined the British Army, and, like his narrator in A Soldier’s Tale, served as a bombardier artillery clerk with an Air Observation unit. 

Joseph returned to Auckland as a lecturer in English in 1946, carrying ‘absurd burdens of lecturing and marking’, and therefore able to write only as he had done during the war, ‘in random scraps of time’.
He died in 1981.