As everyone who works in publishing knows, almost everyone has written a book, or wants to write a book or believes that they could write a wonderful book and many of these people do actually put pen to paper and send their work to us. As a result, every day we are deluged with an assortment of offerings from the sublime (although unfortunately rather few of those) to the ridiculous and everything in between, but we only have about 30 places on our Pier 9 imprint in any given year, and we therefore have to be incredibly selective about our choices.

So the books that do make it through, really have to stand out, and Don Tate’s stunning book, The War Within, is unquestionably one of those books.

When Kay Scarlett, our Publishing Director and I read the first draft of this book, we were absolutely stunned. The horror of the past that was being evoked and the raw power of the writing, were completely riveting, if in equal measure, disturbing. Don has the rare talent of being able to get the words on the page with a deceptive simplicity, that not only takes you right to the time and place that he is writing about, but also brings you inside his head, so that you are viewing the events and the emotions through his eyes and heart, and that is not always a very comfortable place to be. Because Don does not spare himself or his reader. As he says in the book:

“I had cause to seriously reflect on my life. I’d reached a point where there’s not a lot of light, or fight left in a man. The darkness that followed me home from Vietnam had engulfed me completely.”

From his early childhood in Brisbane, marked by poverty and abuse, through his traumatic experiences in Vietnam as a nineteen year old, and the years of medical treatment that followed, then on into his adult life, struggling to find a place in the world where he felt accepted, The War Within chronicles Don’s attempt to reconcile some of the forces at play in his world, and to reach some measure of acceptance and understanding.

This is not an easy book, and it has to be said, that Don is not always an easy man, and when you read the book, you will understand why. But the unrelentingly honest and open way in which he bares his soul in this book, make it, and indeed him, truly remarkable.

This is an important book, from an enormously talented writer and we are very proud to be publishing it here tonight.

Juliet Rogers

CEO, Murdoch Books