AustLit

'This tragic story begins in a Catholic presbytery in rural ­Victoria. Father Pearse is reading news of the battlefields of World War I: “The reports discharged their usual cargo of misery.” And so the mood is set for the narrative to breathe with the deepest, darkest, most agonising melancholy. While two of the young characters will be killed at the front, and the priest will be left with the torment of his own moral failure, the church itself will be exposed as a single-minded glaring powerhouse of corruption, a “massive theological boulder” blocking the path of truth.' (Introduction)