The breathtaking new novel from the Miles Franklin Award shortlisted author of Storyland, for readers of Anthony Doerr, Fiona McFarlane and Barbara Kingsolver.

DECEMBER 1944: In New Guinea, a young Australian nurse, Lotte Wyld, chances upon her first love, Virgil Nicholson, a soldier in the Allies’ hard-fought jungle campaign. At Los Alamos in the United States, idealistic physicists Miriam Carver and Fred Johnson join Robert Oppenheimer and a team of brilliant scientists in a collective dream to build a weapon that they believe will stop all war. Meanwhile, Kitty Oppenheimer wrestles with restrictions on her freedom. And on the sacred island of Miyajima in Japan, Hiroko Narushima is doing her best to protect her family.

A beautiful, rich and intricately woven novel, To Sing of War asks how one person can make a difference in a world that is wondrous, thrilling and endangered. It insists on our interconnectedness, hums with the energy of the world and is a blazingly powerful and deeply moving account of friendship, love and war.

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‘Transcends the boundaries of historical fiction’ 

Books+Publishing

‘In an exquisite, braided narrative, Catherine McKinnon’s To Sing of War reanimates World War 11 in a paean to the environment. Set between December 1944 and August 1945, the narrators experience the ways “Violence is malleable, it is everywhere”, but find healing and resilience in “the heart of the earth”’.

Cassandra Atherton, Australian Book Review

‘To Sing of War is one of the best things I’ve read this year, sweeping and yet intimate,ambitious, lyrical, propelled by memorable characters you don’t want to let go of … afluid sense of time, a strong evocation of place and events. It’s a novel of big themes,boldly told.’

Caroline Baum

‘It’s beautifully written, it’s all beautifully written … I’m a slow reader, this is a four-
hundred-page-plus book, I motored through it; it goes to how well written it is,’

Richard Aedy, The Bookshelf, Friday 28 June 2024

‘The novel asks whether “war is always the same plot, just different characters,” and it’s the characters in this novel that make it sing.’

Sarah L’Estrange, The Book Show

‘This is a book I didn’t want to end. Its story, characters, settings and portrayal of war’sinsidious barbarity are utterly compelling.’

Anne Green, Good Reading Bookclub—Our Review(5 stars*)

‘I read it as a book that was addressing a different set of mythologies, which is the stories that Australia tells itself about World War Two … moments of terrible cruelty and bad behaviour from Australia soldiers … all of that was a way of remaking the mythologised story of Australia during the Second World War,’

Kate Evans The Bookshelf, Friday 28 June 2024

‘I read very quickly, was totally immersed in it, and then I noticed there were moments of birdsong, of nature, and of music and war; this idea of singing war, which goes back both to Virgil and also to something else, she references Brecht at the beginning, but there is something that she is doing there that I found terribly moving,’

Kate Evans The Bookshelf, Friday 28 June 2024

‘Catherine McKinnon’s last novel, the Miles Franklin-shortlisted Storyland, is one of the more striking Australian novels of recent years. Spanning almost a thousand years, from the 1700s to the 28th century, it powerfully captures the links between colonial destruction and ecological crisis and speaks to the violence inherent in trying to understand the human in separation from the natural world. McKinnon’s new novel, To Sing of War, is no less ambitious. Interweaving the stories of half a dozen characters spread across the planet, it traces them to their convergence in the moment when the bomb fell on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, wiping out tens of thousands of lives in a matter of seconds.

Although the horror of Nagasaki is the still point around which To Sing of
War orbits, the book’s concerns are not focused on the planetary rupture of that
moment alone. Instead it seeks to tease out a series of deeper connections between the most intimate forms of violence and the larger, social brutality of war, and to explore the many ways in which both affect those caught up in them … The real power of this deeply intelligent and very affecting novel flows from its awareness of what war does to those caught up in it.’

James Bradley, The Saturday Paper

‘In a world simultaneously wondrous, thrilling and endangered, the narrative
challenges us to consider the impact of individual actions and whether one person can truly make a difference … Transcends the bounds of historical fiction, pushing readers to confront the complexities of human nature in the face of a world forever altered.’

Emma Pei Yin, Books&Publishing

‘War writing can sometimes be formulaic and clichéd, but McKinnon seeks a grittierview of war’s complexities. To Sing of War recognises the prevalence of sexual violence in wartime – something which is often overlooked in commemorations.’

Brigid Magner, The Conversation

‘An intricately woven novel, straddling war, love and friendship.’

Sydney MorningHerald.