Winner of the Junior Fiction Award and Children's Choice Junior Fiction
Award, New Zealand Post Book Awards for Children and Young Adults,
2013.
Winner of the Lianza Librarians' Choice Award, 2013.
It's New Zealand, 1914, and the biggest war the world has known has just
broken out in Europe. William eagerly enlists for the army but his
younger brother, Edmund, is a conscientious objector and refuses to
fight. While William trains to be a soldier, Edmund is arrested. Both
brothers will end up on the bloody battlefields of France, but their
journeys there are very different. And what they experience at the front
line will challenge the beliefs that led them there.
In 2002, David Hill won the Children's Literature Foundation Award
for See Ya Simon and the same book won the TES Award for Special Needs
in 1994. In 2003, he was the Robert Lord writer-in-residence and in 2005
he received the Margaret Mahy Medal for his significant contribution to
children's literature in New Zealand. His books have been translated
into French, Chinese and Estonian. His short stories and plays for
teenagers and young readers have been published and broadcast in New
Zealand, Australia and the USA.
"It is a searing read but the book speaks with great authority." Clare
Morpurgo, The School Librarian (UK publication)
"...this is an important and highly readable book." NZ Listener
"...there are stories that need to be told over and over again ..." NZ
Post Book Awards for Children & Young Adults
"Beautifully written and deeply engrossing." Otago Daily Times
