McALISTER AND THE GREAT WAR - The Prequel to the McAlister Line Series

Book excerpt: On his seventeenth birthday, New South Wales farm boy, Callan McAlister joins the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) and is swept away to war. His first taste of blood comes from an unexpected enemy in the Sinai Desert, before being shipped to Gallipoli. Callan receives a shock while convalescing in peaceful, idyllic Ireland during the Easter of 1916. But the Western Front awaits — all before his nineteenth birthday. Callan falls in love with a lovely English beauty, Ivy Brown, but their path to happiness is neither easy nor pre-ordained. A lowly Australian private soldier is viewed with doubt and disapproval by Ivy’s aristocratic family — not to mention Callan’s chances of surviving the brutality of the Great War. An offer to join the fledgling Royal Flying Corps (RFC) may be Callan’s chance to escape the endless mud-filled trenches, infested with rats, lice, trench fever and foot-rot, and tormented by German machine-gunners and artillery bombardments. But, with minimal training, an RFC pilot’s life expectancy is tenuous at best. Ivy also experiences her baptism of fire as an ambulance driver for the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY). Callan and Ivy’s struggle reaches its startling climax in an air race to the far reaches of the British Empire where law and justice are the domain of the most powerful and those ruthless enough to go to any lengths to achieve their desires. If you read only one book set against WWI during its centenary anniversary, make it McAlister and the Great War. This novel, ranging across a truly global canvas, explores many fascinating and thrilling historical incidents that occurred during the tragic conflict.