Beaglier Books Sisters Under the Rising Sun

Amid the turmoil of World War II, Norah Chambers, an English musician living in Malaya, sends her eight-year-old daughter Sally away on a ship bound for Australia, desperate to keep her safe from invading Japanese forces. Two months later, Norah has fled to Singapore. As has Australian nurse Nesta James, who had originally enlisted to care for Allied troops. But as the Japanese Army overruns the former British colony, she joins a terrified cargo of people, including the heartbroken Norah, crammed aboard the merchant ship Vyner Brooke. Only two days later, they are bombarded from the air off the coast of Indonesia, and in a matter of hours, the Vyner Brooke has sunk. After surviving 24 hours in the sea, Nesta and Norah reach the beaches of a remote island, only to be captured and held in a succession of Japanese POW camps, places of starvation and brutality, where disease runs rampant.