Gallipoli Street. Mary-Anne O’Connor. 2016.

At 17, Veronica O’Shay is happier running wild on the family farm than behaving in the ladylike manner her mother dictates, and she despairs both of her secret passion for her brother’s friend Jack Murphy and what promises to be a future of restraint and compliance.

But this is 1913 and the genteel tranquility of rural Beecroft is about to change forever as the O’Shay and Murphy families, along with their new neighbours the Dwyers, are caught up in the theatre of war.

From the horrors of Gallipoli to the bloody battles of the Somme, through love lost and found, the Great Depression and the desperate jungle war along the Kokoda Track, this sprawling family drama brings to life a time long past….a time of desperate love born in desperate times and acts of friendship against impossible odds.