The Gulf War becomes a touchstone for a woman's recreation of her mother's life in World War II Australia in Taken (Anansi $17.95) by Daphne Marlatt. The narrator's lover has left for the United States to care for her ageing mother. In her absence, the narrator thinks how her own mother, Esme, pregnant and stranded in Australia, must have felt the day her husband, Charles sailed back into the war "to do his duty"; against the Japanese.

[BCBW 1997]