A Melbourne Bookkeeper Finds Herself inside a Wartime Rescue Network in New Novel "Why We Dared"

AUSTRALIA, October 15, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Author Daryl Farry’s novel Why We Dared revolves around an Australian woman who travels to France as a young bookkeeper and ends up working inside a Carmelite abbey that shelters Jewish refugees during the German occupation.

𝗔𝗻 𝗔𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗹𝗶𝗮𝗻 𝗶𝗻 𝗙𝗿𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲

Bernadette Mary O'Shea is born in Melbourne in July 1915, the sixth child of Irish Catholic parents. Her father works on the wharves. A crane collapse seriously injures him in 1934 but the investigators cannot explain it because the crane had passed a stress test days earlier. Bernadette studies bookkeeping and shorthand and takes night classes in French, and not long afterwards she boards an ocean liner for Europe. The voyage takes her through Singapore, Colombo, Alexandria and Cairo before she lands in France, where she tests her accent on strangers in Marseille to see whether they can understand her.

She takes a job with a trading company in Paris, and the early chapters are lighter than what follows, full of cafés, interviews and the small embarrassments of a young woman learning to live abroad. Then she is invited to do some part-time bookkeeping for a Carmelite abbey in Lyon, and the story changes.

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗝𝗼𝗯 𝗡𝗼𝗯𝗼𝗱𝘆 𝗗𝗲𝘀𝗰𝗿𝗶𝗯𝗲𝗱

The sisters need help with their accounts, but what Bernadette finds there was not in the job offer. The abbey belongs to a network that hides Jewish men, women and children from the authorities, with the support of a bishop, a local underground group and a few trusted outsiders. By the middle of the book the community has helped more than three hundred people, and the story keeps count of the losses as well as the rescues.

The danger grows after the Germans take over the southern zone in November 1942. The chapters follow forged papers, safe houses, coded messages and night movements through the covered passageways of Lyon. Bernadette later joins the abbey as a postulant, and she and a friend named Miriam escort many people through the streets, always watching for any sign of trouble. An operation named Silent Dove in August 1944 asks two postulants to guide fifteen people across the city under the noses of German patrols. The Mother Superior, known as Mother John, is arrested, tortured and deported to a camp in Poland, and the later chapters follow her slow recovery.

𝗣𝗹𝗮𝗶𝗻 𝗟𝗮𝗻𝗴𝘂𝗮𝗴𝗲, 𝗖𝗮𝗿𝗲𝗳𝘂𝗹 𝗗𝗲𝘁𝗮𝗶𝗹

The story is fiction set against real history. The fall of France, the Vichy regime and the Gestapo's presence in Lyon are all part of the record, and real figures, including the Gestapo officer Klaus Barbie, appear in the text, while the central characters are invented. Daryl writes in clear, plain language and keeps his attention on the practical side of the work, such as how to move people, how to hide them and how to know who can be trusted. Violence is described without much graphic detail, which keeps the book readable, though some content is still distressing, including torture, concentration camps and the deaths of a child and an elderly man in hiding. The pace is reflective, particularly in the convent chapters, so readers wanting a fast thriller may find it slower than expected.

𝗗𝗼𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗥𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁 𝗪𝗵𝗲𝗻 𝗶𝘁 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗲𝘀 𝗪𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗮 𝗣𝗿𝗶𝗰𝗲

The title asks a question that the book answers near the end. Mother John recalls a conversation with Barbie after her torture, in which she asks whether his faith does not teach goodness toward others. His answer is blunt, and she tells him she will keep praying for him anyway. The scene sums up the book's message, which is about what a person owes to others when the law and conscience point in different directions, and about whether goodness is possible without hatred, even toward an enemy.

The novel also gives space to quiet courage, such as keeping accounts, delivering a message or walking a stranger across a bridge. These are small acts, but the book treats them as the ones that count. Bernadette's own decision to enter religious life is placed alongside the war, not apart from it.

𝗔𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗔𝘂𝘁𝗵𝗼𝗿

Daryl Farry was born in 1946 and served as an infantry and combat medic in the Vietnam War. When he came home, he spent thirty years working as an ambulance officer in Queensland. He and his wife, Felicity, later left emergency work behind for a mango farm near Bundaberg, and the couple eventually settled in Adelaide to live closer to their son and grandson.

His first book was a non-fiction account of war, and he has since turned to fiction. Felicity edits his manuscripts, and their son, Joshua, designs his covers.

Bracken Joseph
Australian Book Publishers
+61 721160858