by Neva Clarke McKenna

Until recently, Neva Clarke McKenna was too embarrassed and afraid to tell the story of her experiences as a clerical secretary in Italy during the second World War. Now, her participation in the award-winning film War Stories has given her the courage to write her own personal account, revealing herself as the person she was in her wartime diaries.

This is the experience of one 'ordinary' New Zealand girl and how the war changed her life for ever as she worked close to the New Zealand men in Italy, close to the killing, the wounding and the surviving. Angel in God's Office could be the story of many women. Women who were once young girls whose lives crumbled with disillusionment, whose choices were stolen from them by the fact of war, yet who picked up the pieces and got on with life because there was no alternative.

Neva's experiences, however, were unique and she writes of them with appealing naturalness, honesty, humour and warmth.

Trade Paperback 176 pages. Published by Tandem Press, 1996 B/w illustrations

Good condition: fading to spine area, small name on half-title page,