Broken Vows

Albert Robertson, the eldest son of a strict Irish-New Zealand Catholic family, does his duty and joins the clergy. A committed and devout priest, he eventually becomes fully ordained and is even the marriage celebrant for his younger brother in later years. While still in the seminary, Al is caught in the Napier earthquake of February 1931. Buried in the rubble of the seminary’s chapel, he is pulled out unconscious and barely alive, his body broken. He is nursed back to health by Abigail McCarthy, a nurse from the local Napier hospital, who has been sent to the seminary to tend to the injured, along with her cousin Moira. Nurse and patient fall deeply in love and spend the next six years in a desperate bid to be together. They struggle with their own feelings, their commitment to the Catholic Church, their love for their families and the attempts by the church to separate them and destroy their relationship. Those efforts are led by Father Connolly, a strict disciplinarian whose main aim is to protect the Church’s reputation and power as society crumbles during the Depression. When Abigail is transferred to Fiji on a nursing secondment to a remote hospital, it seems that her relationship with Al may crumble...

Find Your North Star

William Robertson is a torn man. It’s been nearly four and a half years since his once beloved eldest brother, Albert, fled the clergy and eloped with a woman. The couple are now blacklisted from both families, he’s come to despise Albert and the affect his actions have had on the family, especially their mother. War is now raging across Europe and the same sinister clouds are looming over the Pacific nations. His desire to serve is met when he enlists with the Royal New Zealand Air Force and is assigned to 75 New Zealand Squadron as an aircraft navigator and bomb aimer, stationed at RAF Feltwell, Norfolk. Meeting a South African nurse, Darlene du Toit, after getting injured on his first combat mission, he starts to see parallels between his life and that of his older brother, Albert. Darlene has to deal with the horrors of ever-increasing casualties from Bomber Command sorties over Germany and occupied Europe. Two mysterious strangers cross her path and quickly become a danger to Darlene’s life.

This powerful story, based on true life events, traces a man’s conflicts with family honour, his service to King and Country, pain at losing his brother from his life and the burgeoning love for a woman.