The Distance Between Dreams
Fremantle, Western Australia, 1939. After a chance encounter at a society function, Sarah Willis and Winston Keller are immediately attracted to one another but their budding relationship will have many obstacles in its way.
Sarah comes from a privileged, moneyed background, while Winston’s family struggles to get by. There is also some unpleasant past history between their respective fathers that no-one in either family is prepared to talk about. When all is revealed, it causes what seems to be an insurmountable rift between Sarah and Winston. The outbreak of war sends the couple on divergent paths. Winston enlists, and Sarah meets American submariner, Nick Anderson. Against the advice of her best friend, Marly, but coerced by her father, she makes a fateful decision. And then, after five years of war, is it ever possible for any of them to return to the people they had once been?
At the beginning, this reads like a modest World War II love story, but what pushes it beyond such is the powerful exploration of what Australian prisoners of war had to endure when forced by the Japanese to build the Thai-Burma Railway. No-one reading these chapters can fail to be moved by the vivid, often shocking, descriptions of how these men suffered and died, and of how a rare few managed to survive against all the odds, buoyed by sheer grit, love and hope – all laced with doses of Aussie laconic humour. The 1919 flashback to the source of the conflict between the naive, but honourable, George Keller and the manipulative, controlling Robert Willis, is also well-crafted.
Aside from the immensely likeable Sarah and Winston, there are other entertaining characters who are worth spending time with in this uplifting and enjoyable novel.
