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)

Set in the ruins of postwar Japan and the wheatfields of country Australia, Ashes and Sakura is a powerful story of love, guilt, and redemption.
When Australian soldier Tom Davis joins the British Commonwealth Occupation Force in Hiroshima Prefecture, he hopes to atone for what he saw in the Pacific War. Amid the rubble and uneasy calm of 1946 Japan, he meets Natsuko Iwasa, a young woman trying to rebuild her life. Their bond defies the rules of the occupation and the scars of war that divide them.

Back home in 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 must stand against her father and the small-town morality of postwar Australia.

Blending historical truth with deeply human drama, Ashes and Sakura explores Australia’s search for identity, the lingering shadows of the Second World War, and the fragile hope of rebuilding love from ruin.
A companion to An Attractive Naivety, it continues the Becoming Australia series by David Gormley-O’Brien, author and historian based in Victoria.