From the Ashes/The Restless Years Books in Order

The Restless Years sequence follows a web of New Zealand and Australian families as they move from a 1950s department store floor to the streets of Kings Cross and, finally, to the battlefields of Vietnam. Each novel can be read on its own, but together they track two decades of social change through the eyes of women who are trying to work, love and stay afloat.

Fire opens in 1953 in an unnamed New Zealand city, where four working class friends are employed at Dawsons, a glamorous department store. In the week before Christmas, with the country preparing for a royal visit, a blaze in the building exposes how class and profit can matter more than the lives of shop girls. The book introduces the blend of everyday detail and looming disaster that runs through the series, showing how one tragedy can echo for years.

Those echoes surface again in From the Ashes, set in late 1950s Auckland. Allie Manaia, a cosmetics counter assistant and survivor of the earlier fire, is still waking from nightmares while trying to build a new life with her Māori husband, Sonny. The couple’s marriage is tested when wealthy, lonely customer Kathleen Lawson takes a possessive interest in Allie and recoils from Sonny’s background, while Sonny’s younger sister Polly is living it up as a model and good time girl. The novel threads questions of race, respectability, religion and women’s expanding choices through a tight circle of friends and relatives.

The Jacaranda House shifts the focus to Polly Manaia after she has moved to Sydney’s notorious Kings Cross. Now working as an exotic dancer, she longs to bring her eleven year old daughter Gina over from New Zealand, even though her own life is fuelled by alcohol, pills and unresolved trauma. Polly shares a flat with Rhoda and Star, two transgender performers at Les Girls, and the three of them create a strange but loving household around Gina. Their story explores queer community, motherhood, addiction and prejudice at a time when few people spoke openly about any of those things.

In The Leonard Girls the series jumps forward to 1969 and the Vietnam War. Rowie Leonard is a nurse who supports the war and volunteers for a tour of duty in South Vietnam, only to discover first hand how messy and morally uncertain the conflict really is. Her younger sister Jo, a folk singer and student protester in Auckland, falls for professional soldier Sam Apanui and joins a rock band heading to entertain ANZAC troops, hoping to see both Sam and Rowie. Between the hospital wards, music halls and protest marches, the book shows how one war divides families as much as it divides nations.

Across these novels you can expect warm, sometimes chaotic whanau gatherings, sharp humour and a lot of period detail, from department store makeup counters to Kings Cross drag shows and army field hospitals. The stakes are rarely abstract, though, because Challinor keeps bringing big historical events down to the level of friendships, romances and family arguments. Read in order, the Restless Years series feels like watching one extended family grow from postwar optimism into the hard questions of the late 1960s.