Traitor
By (Author) Stephen Daisley
Text Publishing
The Text Publishing Company
2nd May 2011
Australia
General
Fiction
First World War fiction
A823.4
Winner of Prime Ministers Literary Award for Fiction 2011 (Australia)
296
Width 128mm, Height 198mm
216g
What would make a soldier betray his country In the battle-smoke and chaos of Gallipoli, a young New Zealand soldier helps a Turkish doctor fighting to save a boy's life. Then a shell bursts nearby; the blast that should have killed them both consigns them instead to the same military hospital. Mahmoud is a Sufi. A whirling dervish, he says, of the Mevlevi order. He tells David stories. Of arriving in London with a pocketful of dried apricots. Of Majnun, the man mad for love, and of the saint who flew to paradise on a lion skin. You are God, we are all gods, Mahmoud tells David; and a bond grows between them. A bond so strong that David will betray his country for his friend. Daisley's astonishing debut novel is a story of war and of love how each changes everything, forever. Traitor is that rarest of things: a work of fiction that will transport the reader, heart and soul, into another realm.
Stephen Daisley was born in New Zealand in 1955. He has served in the New Zealand Army and worked at a variety of jobs in New Zealand and Australia including on sheep and cattle stations. Traitor is his first novel. He now lives in Perth.