LATEST NOVEL FROM JOHN STEPHENSON

November 1942. From battlefront New Guinea, war correspondent Pat Kinnane lands in Brisbane, General MacArthur’s Headquarters, and finds himself in another kind of war. Amid serious Allied tension, with his guide Kay Dalberg a smart, political young woman, over nine days he liases with operational US military, befriends a desperate Kokoda veteran, edges into a complicated love triangle and is witness to the mysterious death of a soldier…

Published by Boolarong Press

BUY NOW

scroll down

Praise for Requiem For A Riot

 

‘Written with huge zest. Echoes of Ulysses with a soupcon of Boys’ Own, and a great deal else besides. The best descriptions of Brisbane I have ever read. The way Aussies felt about the Americans at that time captured completely. The American characters pitch perfect. All the beaut little details add up – Fabulous writing.’ 

—Gayla Reid, winner of the Canadian Ethel Wilson Prize for Fiction, the CBC/Saturday Night Literary Award and the Marian Engel Award.

 

‘A novel complex in narrative and character, profound in insight and passionately written. Yet perhaps the greatest character in it is Brisbane itself, pulsing with Australian and American tensions, racial and sexual.’ 

—Barry Oakley, playwright and novelist.

 

‘A moving story, Requiem For A Riot also shows how the Yanks brought us more than money, randiness and know-how. They brought a big, multicultural, sophisticated world. These invaders were also eye-openers.’ 

—Carl Harrison-Ford, critic.

 

‘Stephenson draws a riveting picture of the men of the two armies, the US forces better paid and provisioned, competing for the affections of the women of Brisbane. The book is a detailed witnessing to the lead-up to the Battle of Brisbane and its first night, based on impeccable research. It brings back to life a major episode in inter-allied relations that we forget at our peril.’ 

—Robert O’Neill, former Chichele Professor of the History of War at the University of Oxford and Australian Official Historian for the Korean War.

An excerpt from The Baker’s Alchemy

John Stephenson

John Stephenson lives in the Blue Mountains region of Australia, a World Heritage forest site.

In his new novel Requiem For A Riot  John Stephenson takes the reader into the gritty, momentous and often dangerous world of Australia’s military capital, Brisbane during World War II—all without losing a sense of romance, beauty and humour. 

It follows on John’s earlier novels The Baker’s Alchemy, an original and exhilarating twist on the Marriage Plot set in nineteenth-century Poland, and The Optimist, the true 1891 story of the Australian poet Christopher Brennan’s shambolic and ebullient love for two women in his youth.

Purchasing Options

Buy on Booktopia

Buy on Boomerang Books