Office of Innocence » (Reprint)

Thomas Keneally is the acclaimed author of more than two dozen books, including Schindler's List, which won the Booker Prize and inspired the film; The Great Shame: The Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World; and, most recently, American Scoundrel, a biography of Civil War general Dan Sickles. He lives in Sydney, Australia.

Marshalling the vast powers of narrative and historical re-creation that he brought to his international bestseller Schindler’s List, Thomas Keneally has created a moving and provocative novel about a headstrong young Catholic priest in World War II Australia. As Sydney braces itself for a Japanese invasion, Father Frank Darragh finds his pastoral duties becoming increasingly challenging. How should he counsel an AWOL black American soldier who may face death for his involvement with a white woman? And what should he say to another woman—the distressingly beguiling Kate Heggarty—who impresses him with her virtue even as she edges toward sin?

When Kate is found murdered, Darragh falls under suspicion. And even if the police clear him, his superiors—and his own conscience—may not. Office of Innocence is a book that’s impossible to put down, dense with moral complexity and alive with period detail.

Paul Baumann

Keneally is comfortable with explicitly religious themes and employs them mostly to good effect. With its dizzying moral ironies, smart pace and deft set pieces, his novel evokes Graham Greene -- especially the Graham Greene of Brighton Rock. Like that novel, Office of Innocence features both a psychopathic killer with theological pretensions and crucial confessional scenes. — The New York Times