Spirit House

Witty, wise and deeply moving, Spirit House is a remarkable novel by a major new voice in Australian fiction, a story of the fall of Singapore and life as a POW, of the bonds of life-long friendship and the bonds of grief, and of a young boy making sense of his future while old men try to live with their past.

David is thirteen and confused. His mum has left with her lover and dumped David on his grandparents. David's grandfather, Jimmy, is seventy. He spends his days at the social club grumbling with his three best friends, all of them Jewish-Australian survivors of the enforced labour camps of the WWII Thai-Burma Railroad. But behind their playful backbiting and irresistible wit, Jimmy and his friends are haunted by the ghosts of long-dead comrades, and the only person Jimmy can confide in is a thirteen-year-old from a different world...