Publisher: Macmillan Australia (Trade Paperback – 29 October 2024)
Series: Colonial series – Book Six
Length: 401 pages
My Rating: 4.25 out of 5 stars
Australia’s master of historical fiction, Peter Watt, continues to shine with the latest exciting book in his Colonial series, The Ghosts of August.
Watt is a fantastic author who has a particular skill at writing fast-paced adventure novels based around Australia’s compelling and complex history. The author of several intriguing multigenerational series, Watt’s current body of work is the Colonial series, which started back in 2018 with The Queen’s Colonial. An awesome book that followed a young Australian farmer, Ian Steele, who journeys to England and through a series of shenanigans gets commissioned in the British army as a captain, gaining the moniker the Queen’s Colonial. I had a lot of fun with this first book, and Watt has kept the series going strong ever since. The next two books in the series, The Queen’s Tiger and The Queen’s Captain, followed Ian through several mid-19th century wars, while also encountering love, loss, and dark intrigues. The third and fourth novels, The Colonial’s Son and Call of Empire, featured a time skip to the late 19th century, where a mostly retired Ian had taken a step back from adventuring while his two sons, Josiah and Samuel, became the main characters. With the death of Ian at the end of Call of Empire, the series entered a new phase as Watt again skipped ahead with The Ghosts of August. Set around the turbulent events of World War I, The Ghosts of August was another fantastic entry in the series that continued to follow all the adventures of the Steele family.
The Queen’s Colonial, Ian Steele, is dead, but his family still serve the crown, especially as the threat of war spills across the globe. Ian’s oldest son, Josiah, is now head of the Steele family, and, like his father before him, he has two very different sons to worry about. His oldest son, David, is a canny and cultured young man with the world at his feet, while his youngest son Ben is a wild child, constantly finding trouble and solving it with his fists. However, despite their differences, both David and Ben are about to be caught up in the chaos of war.
Ben, sent away on a secret mission about the family’s boat, inadvertently finds himself trapped in German New Guinea when the war breaks out, where circumstances force him to become a desperate fugitive from the German troops stationed there. David, determined to do his bit, becomes an officer in the Australian army, and finds himself involved in Australia’s attempt to take control of German New Guinea, hoping to reunite with his brother.
However, with petty grievances and the love of a women between them, Ben and David find themselves on different paths as the war progresses. While David finds himself serving as an officer on the Western front, Ben signs up as an enlisted man in the deserts of Palestine. Both brothers will face danger and death the like of which the world has ever seen before, and the desperate battles will rock the Steele family to its very core.
The Ghosts of August was another awesome book from Watt that pits the latest generation of his central family against all the horrors of war, turmoil and history. A great addition to the Colonial series, The Ghosts of August was a very fun and action-packed read that cleverly tied into some fascinating periods of history.
Watt features a very familiar narrative structure for The Ghosts of August, which follows the current protagonists of the Colonial series into a whole new conflict. Starting in 1914, the novel initially follows the various characters through the period leading up to the conflict, before throwing them right into the carnage with several battles and action pieces. Making great use of the historical record to enhance his narrative, Watt sets his story throughout a range of fascinating locations and periods, all shown from the overlapping perspectives of his point-of-view characters. Watt provides an interesting spread of protagonists in The Ghosts of August; while the key characters are the younger members of the Steele family, you also see alternate perspectives from the books various antagonists, as well as some more friendly German characters. There is a good mixture of action, character-focused drama, and intrigue as these figures deal with issues on various fronts. I particularly enjoyed Ben’s attempt to survive in the wilds of German New Guina for the first part of the book, while the various intricate depictions of war in the second half of the book steal the show, especially as there is a ton of tragedy and shocking moments. Watt brings the entire narrative to a sad, but hopeful end, and it will be interesting to see if or how the author continues the series in the future.
As with all the books in the Colonial series, The Ghosts of August works well as both a standalone novel and a continuation of the rest of the series, as Watt highlights key character history and previous adventures in an effective manner for new readers. I personally have had a lot of fun exploring the entire series from the start, and it has been great to see how the central family has evolved. The focus on a single family and its various members, friends and enemies throughout turbulent points of history is a fun writing style that the author has a lot of experience in, and it always results in an entertaining and fast-paced book. As with the previous Colonial novels, Watt’s focus on action, warfare, and the intricate history of the period, is the highlight of The Ghosts of August. Anyone with a love of early 19th century warfare or adventure is in for a great time, and I deeply enjoyed the powerful war sequences the author featured. However, I did think that some of the characters were a little one-dimensional in places, especially as his two main protagonists, brothers Ben and David, are carbon copies of other Watt central characters. That being said, Watt writes an excellent storyline that sees the two brothers at odds due to an alluring German noblewoman, and the resulting attempts to get past it are moving, with some real tragedy thrown in. I also enjoyed the devious German military antagonist, Kurt Jäger who plagues Ben in the first half of The Ghosts of August, and whose full storyline in the novel proves to be particularly interesting. An overall fun book that is easy to enjoy, especially if you have read one of Watt’s novels in the past.
The final element of The Ghosts of August that I want to highlight is the fascinating historical features that really made this novel stand out. Watt has a clear love for Australian history that shines through in his writing, especially in The Ghosts of August where he dives into various unique aspects of Australia’s contribution to World War I. Not only does he take his characters to the obligatory battlefields of Gallipoli and the Western Front (the former of which is relatively brief for an Australian war novel), but he also examines other lesser-known conflicts Australia was involved with during this period. This includes Australia’s contribution to the fighting in the Middle East, as there are some very intense and action-packed sequences that follow one of the protagonists fighting in Egypt and Palestine with the Australian Light Horse. I also found the first conflict focused on in the book, Australia’s expedition to take control of German New Guinea, to be particularly fascinating. Watt portrays the main battle in compelling and exciting detail, and it was fascinating to learn more about this expedition, especially as it rarely gets featured in fiction, despite being Australia’s first contribution to the war. All these historical elements are expertly woven into the main narrative by Watt, who always does an outstanding job of setting his own story arcs around these events. You really get stuck into both the narrative and the Australian history as a result, and I loved seeing more of Watt’s infection love for Australian wartime history.
The Ghosts of August was another amazing book from Peter Watt that provided a fantastic continuation to his highly enjoyable Colonial series. Loaded with action, adventure and interesting historical inclusions, The Ghosts of August is classic Watt, and I had a ton of fun with it as always. I am curious to see where Watt goes next, as I will always be eager to grab another historical adventure from this excellent Australian author.
The Unseen Library 