Children Of War Trilogy/Tamar Deane Trilogy Books in Order

Under its Children of War or Tamar Deane label, this trilogy follows one family across the upheavals of late nineteenth and early twentieth century New Zealand. It begins with a young Cornish woman chasing a new start and ends with her grandchildren facing yet another global war.

Tamar opens in 1879 with seventeen year old Tamar Deane, newly orphaned in a remote Cornish village. With little to keep her in England, she takes assisted passage to Auckland and, on the Plymouth quay, falls in with Myrna McTaggert, an entrepreneurial woman on her way to set up what she intends will be the finest brothel in the southern hemisphere. Tamar’s early years in New Zealand are marked by bad choices, exploitative relationships and flashes of stubborn independence as she learns how limited respectable options can be for a woman alone.

Over time Tamar’s fortunes change. She becomes part of a complicated blended family, inherits land and builds Kenmore, a prosperous Hawke’s Bay estate. Yet the wider world keeps pressing in. By the end of Tamar her loved ones are being drawn toward the Boer War in South Africa, and she is left to reckon with the cost of the ambitions that lifted her out of poverty.

In White Feathers the focus shifts to Tamar and Andrew Murdoch’s adult children on the eve of World War I. Illegitimate eldest son Joseph, who fought as a European in the earlier conflict, now wants to enlist in the Māori Battalion, caught between two cultures in a country still working out its identity. One brother signs up enthusiastically, another becomes a conscientious objector, and daughter Keely leaves her sheltered life to serve overseas as a nurse. Through these different paths the novel shows how war fractures even close knit families.

Blue Smoke brings the saga into the era of the 1931 Napier earthquake, the Great Depression and World War II. Tamar is now an ageing matriarch, badly injured when Napier is destroyed, and it is her grandchildren who take centre stage as they confront economic hardship, the lure of fighting in Spain with the International Brigades, and then the pull of another world war. The book also touches on land girls, war brides and the medical advances that offered new hope after devastating injuries.

Taken together, the trilogy traces how one woman’s risky decision to board a ship reshapes multiple generations. It is rich with details of colonial Auckland, Hawke’s Bay farms, South African battlefields and New Zealand home fronts, but always rooted in domestic scenes, quarrels and affections. Readers who like long arcs about family, class and the legacies of war will find a lot to sink into here.