Perhaps it’s the Zeitgeist, but Brenda Walker is the third Australian woman this year, after Geraldine Brooks in March and Delia Falconer in The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers, to fix her imaginative sights on men’s experiences of war and its aftermath. Walker’s book, however, directs as much attention to the home front and to the women left behind.

The Wing of Night opens on Fremantle docks in 1915, with two women farewelling their men, who are sailing off with a troopship of light horsemen to World War I. Ostensibly, the differences between the couples are marked: Elizabeth and Louis have been married for more than a year and own a farm, while widowed Bonnie and Joe, a yardman at the local pub, have been together for just a few weeks. To date their lives have barely crossed, but the war is set to change all that.