Acts of war

Two very different experiences of World War II and a rollicking read from Australia in latest summer reads.

- GILL SOUTH

THE STORM WE MADE

by Vanessa Chan (Hodder & Stoughton, $37.99)

Malaysian author Vanessa Chan draws on her family history for this gripping story about a family in Kuala Lumpur over two time periods in 1935 in the run-up to World War II and in the final throes of it in 1945.

Cecily Alcantara, a clever young Eurasian, is a bored housewife and mother in Malaya who has always felt looked down upon by the British, who are occupying the country. She finds herself falling for the charms of Bingley Chan, who says he is a Hong Kong merchant but is really General Fujiwara of the Japanese Imperial Army, preparing the ground for an invasion of her country. Eating up Fujiwara's "Asia for Asians" vision, Cecily begins feeding him information she picks up from her mid-level civil servant husband, Gordon, and finds she has a knack for it.

Cecily experiences life in its extremes. In the mid-1930s period, she a woman in love and feeling superior for the first time in her life. Then she's living in fear in 1945, when the Japanese, like the Nazis, have started to see the writing on the wall they have lost the war.

As Chan puts it, the Malayans were being brutalised by people who look like them this time. In 1945, each of Cecily's by then three children is in grave danger. Her son, Abel, is snatched by the Japanese to work in a labour camp; her youngest daughter, 7-year-old Jasmin, is hidden for fear of being recruited as a "comfort woman" for the Japanese; and Cecily's smart older daughter, Jujube, is desperately trying to keep her family safe. Each character is finely drawn. The author is extraordinarily good at evoking the scenes and smells of the time, even people's sour sweat and breath.