Author John Kelly Brings Readers Andrea Secret, Hiroshima Sunset,Saints and Relics,Satan’s Little Helper
*Andrea’s Secret*
Buried deep in the heart of every family, lies a story no one wants to tell…….
In early 1974, a pregnant Andrea Steedman leaves home to conceal the birth of her daughter Mary Therese. A few months after she has given birth, depressed and confused, she agrees to an adoption under highly irregular circumstances.
Twenty two years later on her deathbed, Andrea reveals the existence of her daughter to her wealthy brother Warwick, who as executor, must find Mary Therese and ensure that she receives her rightful share of the estate. On the same day a near fatal car accident thrusts taxi driver, Julian Knowles into the malaise of the troubled Steedman family, tenuously held together by the matriarch Elsie, who is forced to confront sibling rivalry and jealously.
In the ensuing days, Warwick asks and old university friend Brad Murphy to begin the search for Mary Therese. Brad’s investigations however, reveal that all is not as it seems and events conspire to bring the family to the threshold as younger brother and sister vent their anxiety and frustration over the terms of Andrea’s will.
The story unfolds in such a way that the reader is forced to take sides. A carefully crafted piece of writing keeps you guessing until the last few pages.
* HIROSHIMA SUNSET*
In 2007, self-publishing author, Amanda Blackburn accepts an assignment in Japan to help exonerate the name of a former soldier who served in the post-war Australian occupation army in 1946. The soldier’s damning exploits are revealed in a journal written by an unidentified veteran. On arrival in Japan however, Amanda soon discovers that things are not quite as they seemed.
A tender love story set against the background of the all-but-forgotten Australian military contingent, which made up the bulk of the British Commonwealth Occupation Force, sent to Japan in February 1946 following Japan’s surrender at the end of WW2. Assigned responsibility for the Hiroshima prefecture by General Douglas MacArthur, thousands of Australian soldiers disarmed the Japanese war machine, and helped repatriate Japanese soldiers returning home. They were ensconced into an area devastated by a nuclear bomb, where civilians were suffering serious physical and psychological trauma. Inevitably, some of the soldiers fell in love. This is one such story.
*Saints and Relics *
A casket containing a remarkable relic of a 17th century nun, Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, is stolen from a devout society in France by one of its members, a priest from Sydney. The priest, Father James, secretly entrusts the casket to two women in Monterey Creek, a small country town in New South Wales. The Society immediately sends Monsignor Henri Pascal from Paris to Australia to recover both the relic and a manuscript written by the nun, which describes her final revelation. When one of the women dies suddenly, and her house is ransacked, the Monsignor becomes embroiled in the town’s affairs, including the young parish priest’s involvement with a single mother whose daughter claims to have had a vision of the Virgin Mary. When tragedy strikes during the Monterey Creek annual Festival of the Flowers, events threaten the Monsignor’s quest to find both the relic and the manuscript.
Set in a small country town in New South Wales, and complete with
an assortment of colourful characters, this intensely human story poses
questions for devotees of saints and relics, confronts long standing
theological convictions, and articulates a major dilemma for the
Catholic Church: What to do when a priest falls in love.
A powerful and absorbing drama about ordinary people, played out in
Australia and France, it captures the essence of human frailty,
and that unique Australian spirit of scepticism.
*SATAN’S LITTLE HELPERS
*While watching the demolition of his old school Placidus College, Simon Hickey looks back on ten turbulent, life defining years, when the first crop of Australia’s baby boomers were awakening to their sexuality. Seduced by the power of the pulpit, the Aquinine Brothers, and an ever¬present fear that Satan would snare him in an unguarded moment, Simon’s attention is directed toward a religious vocation. At the vocational training college, he encounters a serial paedophile, with far reaching and shocking consequences. A few years later, Simon becomes one of the `unlucky ones’, balloted into the Army for two years National Service in 1965.
A heartfelt, humorous, and poignant story, these two vastly different experiences are linked by a tender romance that defies Catholic conventions of the day, and reveals how two people who choose not to be conformist, cope with the social, religious and political nature of their time.
Author John Kelly
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Yvonne Mason Sewell
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