Jim and Wally

1915. Two Australian boys a world from home face something no training could prepare them for. When poison gas rolls across the French trenches, Jim Linton and his friend Wally are thrust into the brutal education of modern war, far from the sun-baked hills of Billabong station. The brothers-in-arms survive, but everything has changed. Convalescence offers a strange mercy: the green countryside of Ireland, where fishing rivers run clear and horses wait in quiet paddocks. Here, with Jim's sixteen-year-old sister Norah and their father David, the boys begin to remember what peace feels like. But even in this pastoral refuge, unexpected danger finds them, and a new friend the gallant Irishman John O'Neill brings complications neither expected. The Billabong books have been beloved in Australia for a century. This one carries the weight of war without losing the warmth that made the series famous. It's for readers who want to understand what that generation lost and how they found their way back.