Thursday, October 25, 2012

MAXINE ALTERIO's appealing new novel


A novel from the
author of Ribbons of Grace
MAXINE ALTERIO

“Maxine Alterio brings a novelist’s eye to the startling story of New Zealand’s World War I nurses.
I was enthralled and moved by the lives of these women and their experiences of war.”
– Laurence Fearnley, award-winning novelist

The legacy of World War I has been profound; for the men who fought, their loved ones back
home and the nurses and doctors who treated and cared for them, it was life-changing.
Lives we Leave Behind follows Kiwi nursing sisters Meg Dutton and Addie Harrington as they
and 70 nurses depart Wellington for Egypt, aboard the hospital ship Maheno.

Later events in the novel are inspired by a true story – the torpedoing of the British troopship Marquette in
1915, in which lives were lost and ten New Zealand nurses were among the casualties.
Meg and Addie couldn’t be more different; Meg is lively, spontaneous and fun while Addie is
quiet, bookish and diligent. Thrown together by wartime circumstances, first in Egypt then
in France, the two forge an unlikely alliance and ultimately become firm friends. Together,
they care for young soldiers decimated by bombs, shrapnel, bullets and bayonets, and the
attending atrocities of trench warfare: frostbite, dysentery, tetanus, typhoid and gas attacks.
Amid the turmoil of working in makeshift hospitals, casualty clearing stations, trains and
barges, and ever-alert for their next evacuation order, love flourishes. 
Meg falls heart and soul for brilliant surgeon Wallace Madison and Addie forms an attachment to solider and artist Hugh Phillips. However, each liaison is fraught. Wallace nurtures a secret and carries with him
the scars of a dark past, and Addie and Hugh’s relationship is ruptured when Hugh is badly
injured and she is befriended by medical officer Edward Ramsay.

Lives we Leave Behind | 26 October 2012 | 
RRP $ 38.00 | Penguin

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