I remember reading a book a few years ago by Jamie Ford which featured Japanese internment camps, it was a beautiful book and one I’ve remember for some time thanks to great characterisation and subject matter. In Shame and the Captives we have more of the same, yet different. Characters you want to hate, yet at the same time hope they survive.

A deeply written and complex narrative, Keneally is a master craftsman and certainly knows how to deliver a thought provoking storyline, a story that blends a terrifically emotive narrative and Japanese prisoners of war who struggle with captivity; seen as a failure and slight to their very being. The book gives a fictional account of an historical mass escape in 1944 – otherwise known as the Cowra breakout.

The book is a complex read as it follows numerous characters throughout. We follow Alice’s struggles on her father in law’s farm while her husband is held captive in a German POW camp with her belief that if she treats an Italian prisoner well her husband will somehow receive the same treatment. We get a glimpse of life from Australian soldiers, the camp commandant and of course the Japanese soldiers who would rather perish fighting than living in captivity.

An emotive novel, very well researched and told in a fluid and enthusiastic narrative that begs you to keep turning one page to another.