Winner of the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Fiction and shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, Best First Book, 2011. A friendship forged across the battlelines of Gallipoli leads a young soldier to question all he knows about loyalty, and about faith. It will lead him to court martial and brutal punishment; it will sustain him through the horrors of the Western Front. And it will see him home again, a different man from the one who went to war. 'One of the finest debut novels I have read. Indeed it's one of the best novels I have read in recent years...It's about so much more than war: love, friendship, loyalty, honour, mercy, spirituality, multiculturalism, class.' Australian