Love in the Years of Lunacy

Sayer’s beguiling tale of ill-fated love, adventure, jazz, and the Pacific theater of WWII is framed by half-Aboriginal Jimmy Willis, “Australia’s First Indigenous Crime Writer,” accepting the challenge left behind by Pearl Willis, his deceased aunt, to “make her story sing.” That story begins in 1942 Sydney, when Pearl, a 17-year-old budding musician, sneaks into the blacks-only Booker T. Washington Club. She is mesmerized by James Washington, a black GI and sax player, and accepts his invitation to dinner. As Sydney harbor comes under attack by the Japanese, they seek shelter in an amusement park, and Pearl, as the bombs fall, loses her virginity on a carriage ride, leaving her “fuelled by some potent substance her body was manufacturing for the first time.” Both war and discrimination separate Pearl and James, but her obsession with finding him begins an epic race against time that includes a suicide attempt, an engagement to a controlling doctor, and Pearl assuming her twin brother’s identity to fight in New Guinea. While Sayer’s (The Night Has a Thousand Eyes) tale does sing with a keen sense of time, place, and poetic atmosphere, readers best bring to it a great suspension of disbelief—and a handful of tissues. Agent: Gaby Naher, the Naher Agency, Australia. (Nov.)