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Clare Rhoden
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The Stars in the Night Kindle Edition

by Clare Rhoden (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 12 ratings
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Harry Fletcher is a confident young man.


Harry’s sure that he will marry Nora MacTiernan, no matter what their families say. He’s certain that he will always be there to protect Eddie, the boy his father saved from the gutters of Port Adelaide.


Only the War to End All Wars might get in the way of Harry’s plans…


From the beaches of Semaphore to the shores of Gallipoli, the mud of Flanders to the red dust of inland South Australia, this is a story of love, brotherhood, and resilience.

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  1. Print length
    230 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Sticky notes
    On Kindle Scribe
  4. Publisher
    Odyssey Books
  5. Publication date
    January 26, 2019
  6. File size
    2351 KB
  7. Page Flip
    Enabled
  8. Word Wise
    Enabled
  9. Enhanced typesetting
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"From its evocative cover, to the very last sentence, The Stars In The Night is one of those stories which stays with you long after the last page is turned."JAFFA READS TOO Reviews"The Stars in the Night is a poignant and well-told story about the deep bonds between men who served on the Western Front and Gallipoli, and the women who loved them. It is an intimate exploration of the losses of war and the courage required to start anew." KATE MURDOCH, author of Stone Circle. "This is a very well researched and beautifully written novel withwonderful characters. I found it difficult to put down and at timesquite emotional. If you haven't read anything about this war, then trythis new release. And even if WW1 is your thing, read it anyway. Youwon't be sorry."
SC KARAKALTSAS, author of A Perfect Stone."This is the smoothest, most unpretentious and laid-bare engaging war story I have read in a long time. Rhoden is a master storyteller, displaying insight, restraint and empathy. Rhoden has crafted a gem of a story that I hope becomes a set text in Australian schools. Unputdownable."ISOBEL BLACKTHORN, author of The Drago Tree
"I particularly enjoyed reading of the strong women who kept life going even in the face of loss and separation." NORTHERN READER Reviews

From the Author

Like the Southern Cross constellation, Australia at the time of the Great War was a significant and enduring feature of the southern hemisphere, but was relatively unknown in the northern hemisphere.
The Anzacs changed that.
This book is dedicated to their sacrifice, endeavor, and legacy.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07MGGZDDM
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Odyssey Books; PublishDrive edition (January 26, 2019)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ January 26, 2019
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 2351 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 230 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 12 ratings

About the author

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Clare Rhoden

Clare Rhoden

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Clare Rhoden is a writer, blogger and book reviewer from Melbourne Australia. She writes historical fiction, science fiction and fantasy, and is a scholar of WWI literature.

There are many animal characters in her work, who seem to know much more than the humans...

Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5 out of 5
12 global ratings
Reviewed by Discovering Diamonds
4 Stars
Reviewed by Discovering Diamonds
This book has received a Discovering Diamonds Review:Helen Hollickfounder #DDRevs"The Stars in the Night is not just a story of the Great War, but a story of what war does to those who participated in it. "
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Top reviews from the United States

Isobel Blackthorn
5.0 out of 5 stars A valuable contribution to the WW1 narrative
Reviewed in the United States on February 20, 2019
The Stars in the Night opens on a grieving Harry Fletcher missing his wife, Nora. His granddaughter is helping him go through Nora's things. She discovers a journal, composed in WW1 and she insists on hearing her grandfather's story. After a charming portrait of the old man, Harry - heavy of heart, his mind laden with memories - and descriptions of Semaphore, his childhood, his friends and family, the narrative shifts back to the war. First to Gallipoli and then ultimately to Passchendaele, where Harry and his foster brother, Eddie, live out the day-to-day reality of trench warfare. The Stars in the Night captures all that World War One was at a very human level, focussing on the before, the during and the aftermath of survivors picking up their lives. This is a story of resilience, of tragedy, of coming to terms, and of love and hope. At times unbearably sad, at others triumphant and even a little funny, the novel paints a picture of war that is intimate, showing how events occurring in the trenches impacted on the lives of a small coastal village in Australia.Rhoden is careful not to portray her protagonist, Harry, in a stereotypical Aussie bloke fashion. The prose has a distinctly Australian flavour, the tone carrying a hint of Aussie vernacular, but that voice is thankfully not over-played. Rhoden has crafted real men with cares and troubles and shame and big hearts. Plotting, pacing, characterisation are all excellent. The structure - a patchwork of carefully woven scenes interspersed with letters and fragments of Eddie's diary - works perfectly. The story is well-researched. Scenes in the trenches are graphic enough and horrifying. Rhoden's prose comes into its own during the battle scenes:"Now all his senses were stretched alive. The riven darkness slashed his vision, violently radiant with fire, while the air bucked, furrowed by metal. The noise pushed against his ears and the deceitful duckboards beneath him wore a slimy reptilian coat."Such visceral prose that abounds throughout to my mind places The Stars in the Night in the canon of novels set in WW1. This is the smoothest, most unpretentious and laid-bare engaging war story I have read in a long time. Rhoden is a master storyteller, displaying insight, restraint and empathy. Rhoden has crafted a gem of a story that I hope becomes a set text in Australian schools. Unputdownable.
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Insightful and beautifully told
Reviewed in the United States on February 4, 2020
A touching story that lays bare not only the horrors of war but its unrelenting nature. The author took us into the trenches of WWI, among the dirt, the stink and the constant killing. I was there, feeling the threat and actuality of never-ending attacks, that need to keep your head down, day after day. Young souls were quickly stripped of innocence almost as soon as they had left Australian soil. I felt for them. At times shed a few tears. Though this wasn't just a war story. It's a human one. What really shone through and what made me love this story, was the real sense of mateship that existed and how it kept those young men going. Together they dreamed of home, of lives after the war and imagined futures with the women they loved. There were friendships, old and new, and they were what mattered long after the war's end. The author used occasional journal entries and letters home to provide more insights into the character's thoughts and feelings. I enjoyed those. There was a real authenticity to the story-telling and it's obvious the author has done her research and has a strong understanding of the time period and the views of the time. A good read, especially if you like your war histories.
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Malve von Hassell
4.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully written, moving account of two men’s lives against the backdrop of the Great War
Reviewed in the United States on June 25, 2020
Verified Purchase
Harry and Eddie, his foster brother, were close and had always looked out for each other. In World War I, they both enlist in the Australian army. They survive the utter shambles of a military campaign at Anzac Cove in Gallipoli, where over 250,000 lives were lost on both sides, only to be sent to the theater of war in France. Only one of them comes home. The story is told from different perspectives and time frames, drawing on letters, diaries, as well as the experiences of a granddaughter trying to puzzle out what had happened to her beloved grandfather in the war. Initially I found the switching back and forth between narrators and time frames confusing, but ultimately found that it worked for telling this complex story. The horrors of war, survivor guilt, and PTSD are depicted in a compelling manner and juxtaposed with elements of hope in the bonds of friendship, family, and love. Details of life in South Australia provide additional color to this well written and compelling tale.
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Brenda Telford
4.0 out of 5 stars A wonderful, well researched novel!
Reviewed in the United States on February 23, 2019
Harry Fletcher and his foster brother Eddie were close. Ever since his dad had rescued him from the gutter as a six-year-old, Harry had been there for him. When Harry enlisted to fight in WWI, Eddie was right there by his side. Harry was sweet on Nora MacTiernan – he’d known her since he was twelve – and Eddie was sweet on Peggy. They lived with Harry’s mum, Irish born Ellen, and their siblings in Semaphore in South Australia. But the war interrupted their peaceful lives…

Once training was done, it was Gallipoli they headed to first. The disaster of Gallipoli was their first introduction to the war. But it was the mud and freezing cold of Flanders that shook them up. The war didn’t want to end – the deaths of friends and fellow soldiers was all around Harry and Eddie. The horrors were real…

Would Harry return home to Nora? Would he be the same man who left?

The Stars in the Night by Aussie author Clare Rhoden tells the story of a shocking war, in part by means of a diary and letters home. Told in two time frames, with a granddaughter going through old letters and the discovery of a notebook after her grandmother dies, in 1970 and 1917 onward in the war years. Heartbreaking, sad and emotional as the war most surely was, the days, months and years after the war were full of hope and happiness, littered with lingering grief and post traumatic stress – though not recognized as such back then. Rhoden has told a well-researched story, of which the idea came from stories of her own grandparents’ emigration from Europe to Port Adelaide in 1914. Highly recommended.
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Top reviews from other countries

Mark ODwyer
5.0 out of 5 stars A must-read novel about the War to End All Wars and the scars it left
Reviewed in Australia on April 18, 2020
Verified Purchase
1970 in suburban Melbourne: ‘That was how it happened, thought Harry, feeling the memories rise; they were never far away .. Trusting you to remember, trusting you to do something about it. As if you could fix things, mend the dead, put the world back the way it was.’

And so we go back into Harry’s memories, into the seared experiences that gave him writhing nightmares for decades, back to the day in 1917 when Harry cannot find his foster brother Eddie. Harry searches. He crawls out of the Passchendaele mud in no-man’s land searching for him. He looks into dugouts and stumbles down communication trenches and he asks at Casualty Clearing Stations. Fifty years later his granddaughter comes upon an old notebook in the attic and asks, "Who is Eddie?”

This is a story of love. Nora waits for Harry, but he harbours fears whether she can accept him after what he has been through. Eddie hopes for a life with Claudelle. It is a story too of love between men, the love of of brothers-in-arms, Harry and Eddie, Wallis, Hartigan, Alex. From Gallipoli to Flanders the war thunders over all of them like the endless numbing artillery barrages. But it does not end for them when the guns fall silent.

We only recently have begun to speak openly of PTSD ('shell shock' in Harry's day) and understand that it messes people up for a long time. Harry survives wounds and sickness and comes home But in dreams he returns to no-mans’ land, still trying to rescue comrades. The women have their losses too, made harder by Harry’s inability to speak of things he simply does not want to bring to mind. Harry’s mother Ellen, for instance ,cannot connect with him any more.

‘The mines and the shelling is like the end of the world. The worst we have seen, and we have seen some bad ones. Harry and me are fine but it makes you cry. There are so many dead you cant help but walk on them’. Eddies notebook.

Clare Rhoden takes us into this vast arena of events, from the debate in Australia about the rightness of the war, into terrible battles, and on through into the waves of pyschological effects upon those who survived and their families. These 220 pages hold material for a 1000 page book. But the author has brought these large and complicated things down to the personal level by revealing things in the way that we all ordinarily talk to each other: through a household argument, the queries of a nosy neighbour, the grumbles of soldiers about the food and the cold, the guarded talk about Gallipoli by a sergeant to a fresh officer as they weigh each other up, and through diaries and from letters home. This makes 'Stars in the Night' deeply personal and emotional. I got so caught up in it that I paused reading several times so as to absorb it. I cannot praise this novel highly enough both for its story and it’s technical execution.

Although it is about the experiences of Australian soldiers, this novel could really be about the horror of any war, not just the one that millions prayed would be ‘The War To End All Wars.’ The character Harry Fletcher, like thousands of veterans, could not bring himself to attend Anzac Day ceremonies but stayed quietly at home; yet for anyone interested in the scars left by the Great War and thus the origin of the ‘Anzac legend’, the facts of it, and sometimes the mythology of it, this is a must-read.

Lest We Forget.

Note about ‘Anzac’ to readers unfamiliar with it: The first units of Australians shipped out in 1915 were merged with the first New Zealanders into the Australia New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC). Their losses in Gallipoli and later in France shocked both young countries. Australia, population four million in 1914, sent 417,000 men to the conflict, every one of them a volunteer. 62,000 died. Both Australia and New Zealand forces suffered casualty rates of over 55% – killed, wounded, gassed, captured, marked as ‘missing’. The term ‘ANZAC’ endures.

Lest We Forget.
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B. Marshall
5.0 out of 5 stars Engaging, enjoyable, emotional, and recommended war / family drama.
Reviewed in Australia on May 2, 2020
Verified Purchase
War stories, especially those about WWI, generally focus either on the horrors of the trenches, or the trials of the women left behind. There’s plenty of oral histories and first-person accounts of both, so writers and authors are spoiled for choice of insights.

To manage both in the one novel is a worthy, if potentially clumsy, premise. The historical writer must undertake years of research, yet not weigh down their prose with 'authentic' detail. Avoiding overly familiar or clichéd situations and characters is a tough gig – so much has been written of this era, especially for British and Australasian readers. Avoiding sentimentality and cloying focus on ‘sacrifice’, ‘hardship’, ‘mateship’ and other ‘ANZAC values’ is often difficult. To write across an entire era – in this case from WWI to the 1970’s – and with multiple time-jumps, is fraught and risky.

Rhoden not only succeeds in all of this, by writing with focus, care and insight, she creates a richly emotional novel woven from the deeper truths of war and love.

In part a straightforward war drama, in part family drama, I was hooked by Rhoden’s clean, effective and unpretentious prose, captured by her characters and their journeys, and genuinely affected emotionally. I’m not prone to gushes of what normal people call ‘feelings’ – I have a stony, black heart – but I confess there were several points where I…well, let’s just say hay-fever is something I experience from time to time, and several bouts coincided with reading Stars in the Night.

Rhoden also captured the trenches as well or better than any I’ve read, and I’m even prepared to compare her favourably to Pat Barker’s stunning literary masterpiece, The Regeneration Trilogy, on that score.

Stars in the Night also features one extra aspect I rate highly – it’s written neither for women or men but both. Well done, Ms Rhoden – I dips my lid, and thanks you.
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