The undone years

The war to end all wars has recently ended and Caroline Allen, a young arts student, senses a chance of freedom, of escape from the rigid expectations of her family. While she is nursing her mother, who is ill with Spanish Flu, she is invited by a friend, Judy Wilson, to travel to Paris. Judy's father is part of the New Zealand delegation to the 1919 Peace Conference. For Caroline it is a chance to explore European art, to see the originals of so many paintings she has studied only as black and white reproductions. Her friend Judy, however, is interested only in finding a "good" husband. While in Paris Caroline meets Ashley Carrick-Jones, an army officer and a journalist with a 'past' and an enigmatic role in the new Europe. His job takes him to the cities of the defeated powers - Berlin, Vienna and Budapest. Circumstances force Caroline to follow him. The Undone Years is et in the six months following the Armistice at the end of the Great War. Everyone is hoping for new beginnings, for freedom from the horror of fighting: but no one is free of those 'undone years' - the influence they have had or the fears they have created. This is a novel that balances the creative impulses against the destructive past.