Ashes & Sakura - an Australian story of the making of a Pacific nation

Paperback RRP: AUD $30.00

Kindle e-book: AUD $11.99

Published: August 2025

ISBN: 978-1-7641991-0-0

by David Gormley-O'Brien (author)

In the aftermath of the Second World War, a brother and sister find themselves navigating different frontiers of shame, duty, and defiance.

Tom, a returned soldier, joins the British Commonwealth Occupation Force in Japan, hoping to make amends for what he saw—and did—during brutal campaigns in New Guinea and Borneo. Amid the ruins of Hiroshima and the uneasy calm of military occupation, he becomes entangled with a young Japanese woman, and haunted by a war that refuses to stay buried.

Back home in country New South Wales, Tom’s sister Evelyn faces her own reckoning. Pregnant to Giovanni, an Italian prisoner of war once assigned to their family farm, she defies her father and the moral expectations of her small-town community in search of the man she loves.

Ashes and Sakura is a story of fractured loyalties, postwar reckonings, and the fragile hope of making something good in the ruins. A companion to An Attractive Naivety, it continues David Gormley-O'Brien’s evocative exploration of Australia's coming of age in the shadow of global conflict.