Love and War

Anna Creichton and George Trenwith marry in 1938 in the belief that war will not come. Their country, New Zealand, stands outside the European conflict. But within a year they are caught up in a train of events destined to change not only their personal lives and loyalties, but their view of their country and their place in the world.

As the newly weds settle into their life on a remote hill country farm it is not just the present that threatens their happiness, but the past. George’s father, embitted by an earlier war, is at loggerheads with his son, whose determination to fight if war breaks out threatens everything he has worked for. Equally determined to fight, but for very different reasons, is Wiri, the Maori farmhand, whose connection to the fanatical chief, Tuaka, brings an even older conflict – that of the Maori with the European settler – into play.

Conficts old and new are at the heart of Love and War, but it is the personal conflicts faced by Anna and George in their very different spheres of action, that take centre stage. As the story weaves between Greece, where George discovers more than just the horrors and tedium of warfare, and the home front, where Anna, alone with her baby son, and her increasingly unstable father-in-law, is forced to employ a conscientuous objector to help with the farm work, painful choices have to be made.