Ashes and Sakura: an Australian story of the making of a Pacific nation

Author: David Gormley-O'Brien

Published: August 2025

ISBN: 978-1-7641991-0-0

Paperback RRP: AUD $25.00

Kindle e-book: AUD $11.99 on Amazon

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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.

What readers are saying about Ashes and Sakura

Ashes and sakura

'An Attractive Naivety' used a narrative largely of a broad range of members of the Darcy-Davis family to illuminate the history of Australia in the first four or so decades of last century. 'Ashes & Sakura', the sequel, is more tightly focused on the last couple of years of the Second World War and the first couple of years after its end. The main characters are again from the Darcy-Davis family; it is good to be with them again. We start on an army base on Morotai, an Indonesian island, then continue with the occupying military forces in southern Japan. We also make several visits to the families back home.
The narrative is particularly strong, often gripping, also complex, nuanced, and always evolving. It is fascinating to learn of the highly varied attitudes of the 'winners' and 'losers' and how these changed. It is good to have the Darcy-Davis family tree as an appendix.
A beautiful historical novel, highly recommended.

Geoff Cumming